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the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas
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Page 1

FOREWORD

I thecurseofworry
II ours is the age of worry
III nervous prostration and worry
IV holy writ, the Sages and worry
V the needlessness and uselessness
of worry
VI the selfishness of worry
VII causes of worry
VIII protean forms of worry
IX health worries
X the worries of parents
XI marital worries
XII the worry of the squirrel cage
XIII religious worries and worriers
XIV ambition and worry
XV envy and worry
XVI discontent and worry
XVII cowardice and worry
XVIII worry about manners and speech
XIX the worries of jealousy
XX the worries of suspicion
XXI the worries of impatience
XXII the worries of anticipation
XXIII how our worry affects others
XXIV worry versus indifference
XXV worries and hobbies

JUST BE GLAD

BY JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

O heart of mine, we shouldn’t
worry so,
What we have missed of calm we couldn’t
have, you know!

What we’ve met of stormy pain,
And of sorrow’s driving rain,
We can better meet again,
If
it blow.

We have erred in that dark hour, we
have known,
When the tear fell with the shower, all
alone.

Were not shine and shower blent
As the gracious Master meant?
Let us temper our content
With
His own.

For we know not every morrow
Can
be sad;
So forgetting all the sorrow
We
have had,
Let us fold away our fears,
And put by our foolish tears,
And through all the coming years,
Just
be glad.

FOREWORD

Between twenty and thirty years ago, I became involved
in a series of occurrences and conditions of so painful
and distressing a character that for over six months
I was unable to sleep more than one or two hours out
of the twenty-four. In common parlance I was “worrying
myself to death,” when, mercifully, a total collapse
of mind and body came. My physicians used the
polite euphemism of “cerebral congestion”
to describe my state which, in reality, was one of
temporary insanity, and it seemed almost hopeless
that I should ever recover my health and poise.
For several months I hovered between life and death,
and my brain between reason and unreason.

In due time, however, both health and mental poise
came back in reasonable measure, and I asked myself
what would be the result if I returned to the condition
of worry that culminated in the disaster. This
question and my endeavors at its solution led to the
gaining of a degree of philosophy which materially
changed my attitude toward life. Though some
of the chief causes of my past worry were removed there
were still enough adverse and untoward circumstances
surrounding me to give me cause for worry, if I allowed
myself to yield to it, so I concluded that my mind
must positively and absolutely be prohibited from
dwelling upon those things that seemed justification
for worry. And I determined to set before me
the ideal of a life without worry.

Page 2

How was it to be brought about?

At every fresh attack of the harassing demon I rebuked
myself with the stern command, “Quit your Worrying.”
Little by little I succeeded in obeying my own orders.
A measurable degree of serenity has since blessed
my life. It has been no freer than other men’s
lives from the ordinary—­and a few extraordinary—­causes
of worry, but I have learned the lesson. I have
Quit Worrying. To help others to attain
the same desirable and happy condition has been my
aim in these pages.

It was with set purpose that I chose this title.
I might have selected “Don’t Worry.”
But I knew that would fail to convey my principal
thought to the casual observer of the title. People
will worry, they do worry. What
they want to know and need to learn is how to quit
worrying. This I have attempted herein to show,
with the full knowledge, however, that no one person’s
recipe can infallibly be used by any other person—­so
that, in reality, all I have tried to do is to set
forth the means I have followed to teach myself the
delightful lesson of serenity, of freedom from worry,
and thereby to suggest to receptive minds a way by
which they may possibly attain the same desirable
end.

It was the learned and wise Dr. Johnson who wrote:

He may be justly numbered amongst the
benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great
rules of life into short sentences, that may easily
be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent
recollection to recur habitually to the mind.

I have no desire to claim as original the title used
for these observations, but I do covet the joy of
knowing that I have so impressed it upon the memory
of thousands that by its constant recurrence it will
aid in banishing the monster, worry.

It is almost unavoidable that, in a practical treatise
of this nature, there should be some repetition, both
in description of worries and the remedies suggested.
To the critical reader, however, let me say:
Do not worry about this, for I am far more concerned
to get my thought into the heads and hearts of my
readers than I am to be esteemed a great writer.
Let me help but one troubled soul to quit worrying
and I will forego all the honors of the ages that
might have come to me had I been an essayist of power.
And I have repeated purposely, for I know that some
thoughts have to knock again and again, ere they are
admitted to the places where they are the most needed.

I have written strongly; perhaps some will think too
strongly. These, however, must remember that
I have written advisedly. I have been considering
the subject for half or three parts of a life-time.
I have studied men and women; carefully watched their
lives; talked with them, and seen the lines worry
has engraved on their faces. I have seen and
felt the misery caused by their unnecessary worries.
I have sat by the bedsides of people made chronic
invalids by worry, and I have stood in the cells of
maniacs driven insane by worry. Hence I hate
it in all its forms, and have expressed myself only
as the facts have justified.

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Wherein I have sought to show how one might Quit
his Worrying, these pages presuppose an earnest
desire, a sincere purpose, on the part of the reader
to attain that desirable end. There is no universal
medicine which one can drink in six doses and thus
be cured of his disease. I do not offer my book
as a mental cure-all, or nostrum that, if swallowed
whole, will cure in five days or ten. As I have
tried to show, I conceive worry to be unnatural and
totally unnecessary, because of its practical denial
of what ought to be, and I believe may be, the fundamental
basis of a man’s life, viz., his perfect,
abiding assurance in the fatherly love of God.
As little Pippa sang:

God’s in his heaven,
All’s right with the world.

The only way, therefore, to lose our sense of worry
is to get back to naturalness, to God, and learn the
peace, joy, happiness, serenity, that come with practical
trust in Him. With some people this change may
come instantly; with others, more slowly. Personally
I have had to learn slowly, “line upon line,
precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.”
And I would caution my readers not to expect too much
all at once. But I am fully convinced that as
faith, trust, and naturalness grow, worry will cease,
will slough off, like the dead skin of the serpent,
and leave those once bound by it free from its malign
influence. Who cannot see and feel that such a
consummation is devoutly to be wished, worth working
and earnestly striving for?

If I help a few I shall be more than repaid, if many,
my heart will rejoice.

[Signed: George Wharton James]

Pasadena, Calif. February, 1916.

QUIT YOUR WORRYING!

CHAPTER I

THE CURSE OF WORRY

Of how many persons can it truthfully be said they
never worry, they are perfectly happy, contented,
serene? It would be interesting if each of my
readers were to recall his acquaintances and friends,
think over their condition in this regard, and then
report to me the result. What a budget of worried
persons I should have to catalogue, and alas, I am
afraid, how few of the serene would there be named.
When John Burroughs wrote his immortal poem, Waiting,
he struck a deeper note than he dreamed of, and the
reason it made so tremendous an impression upon the
English-speaking world was that it was a new note to
them. It opened up a vision they had not before
contemplated. Let me quote it here in full:

Serene I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, or tide or sea;
I rave no more ’gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me,
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

Page 4

What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it has sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height,
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high
Can keep my own away from me.

I have been wonderfully struck by the fact that in
studying the Upanishads, and other sacred books of
the East, there is practically no reference to the
kind of worry that is the bane and curse of our Occidental
world. In conversation with the learned men of
the Orient I find this same delightful fact.
Indeed they have no word in their languages to express
our idea of fretful worry. Worry is a purely
Western product, the outgrowth of our materialism,
our eager striving after place and position, power
and wealth, our determination to be housed, clothed,
and jeweled as well as our neighbors, and a little
better if possible; in fact, it comes from our failure
to know that life is spiritual not material; that
all these outward things are the mere “passing
show,” the tinsel, the gawds, the tissue-paper,
the blue and red lights of the theater, the painted
scenery, the mock heroes and heroines of the stage,
rather than the real settings of the real life of
real men and women. What does the inventor, who
knows that his invention will help his fellows, care
about the newest dance, or the latest style in ties,
gloves or shoes; what does the woman whose heart and
brain are completely engaged in relieving suffering
care if she is not familiar with the latest novel,
or the latest fashions in flounced pantalettes?
Life is real, life is earnest, and this does not mean
unduly solemn and somber, but that it deals with the
real things rather than the paper-flower shows of
the stage and the imaginary things of so-called society.

It is the fashion of our active, aggressive, material,
Occidental civilization to sneer and scoff at the
quiet, passive, and less material civilization of
the Orient. We despise—­that is, the
unthinking majority do—­the studious, contemplative
Oriental. We believe in being “up and doing.”
But in this one particular of worry we have much to
learn from the Oriental. If happiness and a large
content be a laudable aim of life how far are we—­the
occidental world—­succeeding in attaining
it? Few there be who are content, and, as I have
already suggested few there be who are free from worry.
On the other hand while active happiness may be somewhat
scarce in India, a large content is not uncommon,
and worry, as we Westerners understand it, is almost
unknown. Hence we need to find the happy mean
between the material activity of our own civilization,
and the mental passivity of that of the Orientals.
Therein will be found the calm serenity of an active
mind, the reasonable acceptance of things as they
are because we know they are good, the restfulness
that comes from the assurance that “all things
work together for Good to them that love God.”

Page 5

That worry is a curse no intelligent observer of life
will deny. It has hindered millions from progressing,
and never benefited a soul. It occupies the mind
with that which is injurious and thus keeps out the
things that might benefit and bless. It is an
active and real manifestation of the fable of the
man who placed the frozen asp in his bosom. As
he warmed it back to life the reptile turned and fatally
bit his benefactor. Worry is as a dangerous,
injurious book, the reading of which not only takes
up the time that might have been spent in reading
a good, instructive, and helpful book, but, at the
same time, poisons the mind of the reader, corrupts
his soul with evil images, and sets his feet on the
pathway to destruction.

Why is it that creatures endowed with reason distress
themselves and everyone around them by worrying?
It might seem reasonable for the wild creatures of
the wood—­animals without reason—­to
worry as to how they should secure their food, and
live safely with wilder animals and men seeking their
blood and hunting them; but that men and women, endued
with the power of thought, capable of seeing the why
and wherefore of things, should worry, is one of the
strange and peculiar evidences that our so-called
civilization is not all that it ought to be.
The wild Indian of the desert, forest, or canyon seldom,
if ever, worries. He is too great a natural philosopher
to be engaged in so foolish and unnecessary a business.
He has a better practical system of life than has
his white and civilized (!) brother who worries, for
he says: Change what can be changed; bear the
unchangeable without a murmur. With this philosophy
he braves the wind and the rain, the sand, and the
storm, the extremes of heat and cold, the plethora
of a good harvest or the famine of a drought.
If he complains it is within himself; and if he whines
and whimpers no one ever hears him. His face
may become a little more stern under the higher pressure;
he may tighten his waist belt a hole or two to stifle
the complaints of his empty stomach, but his voice
loses no note of its cheeriness and his smile none
of its sweet serenity.

Why should the rude and brutal (!) savage be thus,
while the cultured, educated, refined man and woman
of civilization worry wrinkles into their faces, gray
hairs upon their heads, querelousness into their voices
and bitterness into their hearts?

When we use the word “worry” what do we
mean? The word comes from the old Saxon, and
was in imitation of the sound caused by the choking
or strangling of an animal when seized by the throat
by another animal. We still refer to the “worrying”
of sheep by dogs—­the seizing by the throat
with the teeth; killing or badly injuring by repeated
biting, shaking, tearing, etc. From this
original meaning the word has enlarged until now it
means to tease, to trouble, to harass with importunity
or with care or anxiety. In other words it is
undue care, needless anxiety, unnecessary
brooding, fretting thought.

Page 6

What a wonderful picture the original source of the
word suggests of the latter-day meaning. Worry
takes our manhood, womanhood, our high ambitions,
our laudable endeavors, our daily lives, by the
throat, and strangles, chokes, bites, tears, shakes
them, hanging on like a wolf, a weasel, or a bull-dog,
sucking out our life-blood, draining our energies,
our hopes, our aims, our noble desires, and leaving
us torn, empty, shaken, useless, bloodless, hopeless,
and despairing. It is the nightmare of life that
rides us to discomfort, wretchedness, despair, and
to that death-in-life that is no life at all.
It is the vampire that sucks out the good of us and
leaves us like the rind of a squeezed-out orange;
it is the cooking-process that extracts and wastes
all the nutritious juices of the meat and leaves nothing
but the useless and tasteless fibre.

Worry is a worse thief than the burglar or highwayman.
It goes beyond the train-wrecker or the vile wretch
who used to lure sailing vessels upon a treacherous
shore, in its relentless heartlessness. Once it
begins to control it never releases its hold unless
its victim wakes up to the sure ruin that awaits him
and frees himself from its bondage by making a great,
continuous, and successful fight.

It steals the joy of married life, of fatherhood and
motherhood; it destroys social life, club life, business
life, and religious life. It robs a man of friendships
and makes his days long, gloomy periods, instead of
rapidly-passing epochs of joy and happiness. It
throws around its victim a chilling atmosphere as
does the iceberg, or the snow bank; it exhales the
mists and fogs of wretchedness and misunderstanding;
it chills family happiness, checks friendly intercourse,
and renders the business occupations of life curses
instead of blessings.

Worry manifests itself in a variety of ways.
It is protean in its versatility. It can be physical
or mental. The hypochondriac conceives that everything
is going to the “demnition bow-wows.”
Nothing can reassure him. He sees in every article
of diet a hidden fiend of dyspepsia; in every drink
a demon of torture. Every man he meets is a scoundrel,
and every woman a leech. Children are growing
worse daily, and society is “rotten.”
The Church is organized for the mere fattening of
a raft of preachers and parsons who preach what they
don’t believe and never try to practice.
Lawyers and judges are all dishonest swindlers caring
nothing for honor and justice and seeking only their
fees; physicians and surgeons are pitiless wretches
who scare their patients in order to extort money
from them; men in office are waiting, lurking, hunting
for chances to graft, eager to steal from their constituents
at every opportunity. He expects every thing,
every animal, every man, every woman to get the best
of him—­and, as a rule, he is not disappointed.
For we can nearly always be accommodated in life and
get that for which we look.

Page 7

We are told that all these imaginary ills come from
physical causes. The hypochondrium is supposed
to be affected, and as it is located under the “short
ribs,” the hypochondriac continuously suffers
from that awful “sinking at the pit of the stomach”
that makes him feel as if the bottom had dropped out
of life itself. He can neither eat, digest his
food, walk, sit, rest, work, take pleasure, exercise,
or sleep. His body is the victim of innumerable
ills. His tongue, his lips, his mouth are dry
and parched, his throat full of slime and phlegm,
his stomach painful, his bowels full of gas, and he
regards himself as cursed of God—­a walking
receptacle of woe. To physician, wife, husband,
children, employer, employee, pastor, and friend alike
the hypochondriac is a pest, a nuisance, a chill and
almost a curse, and, poor creature, these facts do
not take away or lessen our sympathy for him, for,
though most of his ills are imaginary, he suffers
more than do those who come in contact with him.

Then there is the neurasthenic—­the mentally
collapsed whose collapse invariably comes from too
great tension or worry. I know several housewives
who became neurasthenic by too great anxiety to keep
their houses spotless. Not a speck of dust must
be anywhere. The slightest appearance of inattention
or carelessness in this matter was a great source
of worry, and they worried lest the maid fail to do
her duty.

I know another housewife who is so dainty and refined
that, though her husband’s income is strained
almost to the breaking point, she must have everything
in the house so dainty and fragile that no ordinary
servant can be trusted to care for the furniture, wash
the dishes, polish the floors, etc., and the
result is she is almost a confirmed neurasthenic because,
in the first place, she worries over her dainty things,
and, secondly, exhausts herself in caring for these
unnecessarily fragile household equipments.

Every neurasthenic is a confirmed worrier. He
ever sits on the “stool of repentance,”
clothing himself in sackcloth and ashes for what he
has done or not done. He cries aloud—­by
his acts—­every five minutes or so:
“We have done those things which we ought not
to have done and have left undone those things which
we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.”
Everything past is regretted, everything present is
in doubt, and nothing but anxieties and uncertainties
meet the future. If he holds a position of responsibility
he asks his subordinates or associates to perform
certain services and then “worries himself to
death,” watching to see that they “do it
right,” or afraid lest they forget to do it
at all. He wakes up from a sound sleep in dread
lest he forgot to lock the door, turn out the electric
light in the hall, or put out the gas. He becomes
the victim of uncertainty and indecision. He
fears lest he decide wrongly, he worries that he hasn’t
yet decided, and yet having thoroughly argued a matter
out and come to a reasonable conclusion, allows his
worries to unsettle him and is forever questioning
his decision and going back to revise and rerevise
it. Whatever he does or doesn’t do he regrets
and wishes he had done the converse.

Page 8

Husbands are worried about their wives; wives about
their husbands; parents about their children; children
about their parents. Farmers are worried over
their crops; speculators over their gamblings; investors
over their investments. Teachers are worried over
their pupils, and pupils over their lessons, their
grades, and their promotions. Statesmen (!) are
worried over their constituents, and the latter are
generally worried by their representatives. People
who have schemes to further—­legitimate
or otherwise—­are worried when they are
retarded, and competitors are worried if they are not.
Pastors are worried over their congregations,—­occasionally
about their salaries, very often about their large
families, and now and again about their fitness for
their holy office,—­and there are few congregations
that, at one time or another, are not worried by,
as well as about, their pastors. The miner
is worried when he sees his ledge “petering
out,” or finds the ore failing to assay its usual
value. The editor is worried lest his reporters
fail to bring in the news, and often worried when
it is brought in to know whether it is accurate or
not. The chemist worries over his experiments,
and the inventor that certain things needful will
persist in eluding him. The man who has to rent
a house, worries when rent day approaches; and many
who own houses worry at the same time. Some owners,
indeed, worry because there is no rent day, they have
no tenants, their houses are idle. Others worry
because their tenants are not to their liking, are
destructive, careless, or neglect the flowers and the
lawn, or allow the children to batter the furniture,
walk in hob nails over the hardwood floors, or scratch
the paint off the walls. Men in high position
worry lest their superiors are not as fully appreciative
of their efforts as they should be, and they in turn
worry their subordinates lest they forget that they
are subordinate.

Mistresses worry about their maids, and maids about
their mistresses. Some of the former worry because
they have to go into their kitchens, others because
they are not allowed to go. Some mistresses deliberately
worry their servants, and others are worried because
their servants insist upon doing the worrying.
Many a wife is worried because of her husband’s
typewriter, and many a typewriter is worried because
her employer has a wife. Some typewriters are
worried because they are not made into wives, and
many a one who is a wife wishes she were free again
to become a typewriter.

Thousands of girls—­many of them who ought
yet to be wearing short dresses and playing with dolls—­worry
because they have no sweethearts, and equal thousands
worry because they do have them. Many
a lad worries because he has no “lassie,”
and many a one worries because he has. Yesterday
I rode on a street car and saw a bit of by-play that
fully illustrated this. On these particular cars
there is a seat for two alongside the front by the

Page 9

motorman. On this car, chatting merrily with
the handler of the lever, sat a black-eyed, pretty-faced
Latin type of brunette. That he was happy
was evidenced by his good-natured laugh and the huge
smile that covered his face from ear to ear as he
responded to her sallies. Just then a young Italian
came on the car, directly to the front, and seemed
nettled to see the young lady talking so freely with
the motorman. He saluted her with a frown upon
his face, but evidently with familiarity. The
change in the girl’s demeanor was instantaneous.
Evidently she did not wish to offend the newcomer,
nor did she wish to break with the motorman.
All were ill at ease, distraught, vexed, worried.
She tried to bring the newcomer into the conversation,
which he refused. The motorman eyed him with
hostility now and again, as he dared to neglect his
duty, but smiled uneasily in the face of the girl when
she addressed him with an attempt at freedom.

Bye and bye the youth took the empty seat by the side
of the girl, and endeavored to draw her into conversation
to the exclusion of the motorman. She responded,
twisting her body and face towards him, so that her
sweet and ingratiating smiles could not be seen by
the motorman. Then, she reversed the process
and gave a few fleeting smiles to the grim-looking
motorman. It was as clear a case of

How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away,

as one could well see.

Just then the car came to a transfer point. The
girl had a transfer and left, smiling sweetly, but
separately, in turn, to the motorman and her young
Italian friend. The latter watched her go.
Then a new look came over his face, which I wondered
at. It was soon explained. The transfer
point was also a division point for this car.
The motorman and conductor were changed, and the moment
the new crew came, our motorman jumped from his own
car, ran to the one the brunette had taken, and swung
himself on, as it crossed at right angles over the
track we were to take. Rising to his feet the
youth watched the passing car, with keenest interest
until it was out of sight, clearly revealing the jealousy,
worry, and unrest he felt.

In another chapter I have dealt more fully with the
subject of the worries of jealousy. They are
demons of unrest and distress, destroying the very
vitals with their incessant gnawing.

Too great emphasis cannot be placed upon the physical
ills that come from worry. The body unconsciously
reflects our mental states. A fretful and worrying
mother should never be allowed to suckle her child,
for she directly injures it by the poison secreted
in her milk by the disturbances caused in her body
by the worry of her mind. Among the many wonderfully
good things said in his lifetime Henry Ward Beecher
never said a wiser and truer thing than that “it
is not the revolution which destroys the machinery,
but the friction.” Worry is the friction
that shatters the machine. Work, to the healthy
body and serene mind, is a joy, a blessing, a health-giving
exercise, but to the worried is a burden, a curse
and a destroyer.

Page 10

Go where you will, when you will, how you will, and
you will find most people worrying to a greater or
lesser extent. Indeed so full has our Western
world become of worry that a harsh and complaining
note is far more prevalent than we are willing to
believe, which is expressed in a rude motto to be
found hung on many an office, bedroom, library, study,
and laboratory wall which reads:

Life is one Damn
Thing after Another

[Note: this is outlined in a block.]

Those gifted with a sense of humor laugh at the motto;
the very serious frown at it and reprobate its apparent
profanity, those who see no humor in anything regard
it with gloom, the careless with assumed indifference,
but in the minds of all, more or less latent or subconscious,
there is a recognition that there is “an awful
lot of truth in it.”

Hence it will be seen that worry is by no means confined
to the poor. The well-to-do, the prosperous,
and the rich, indeed, have far more to worry about
than the poor, and for one victim who suffers keenly
from worry among the poor, ten can be found among
the rich who are its abject victims.

It is worry that paints the lines of care on foreheads
and cheeks that should be smooth and beautiful; worry
bows the shoulders, brings out scowls and frowns where
smiles and sweet greetings should exist. Worry
is the twister, the dwarfer, the poisoner, the murderer
of joy, of peace, of work, of happiness; the strangler,
the burglar of life; the phantom, the vampire, the
ghost that scares, terrifies, fills with dread.
Yet he is a liar and a scoundrel, a villain and a coward,
who will turn and flee if fearlessly and courageously
met and defied. Instead of pampering and petting
him, humoring and conciliating him, meet him on his
own ground. Defy him to do his worst. Flaunt
him, laugh at his threats, sneer and scoff at his
pretensions, bid him do his worst. Better be
dead than under the dominion of such a tyrant.
And, my word for it, as soon as you take that attitude,
he will flee from you, nay, he will disappear as the
mists fade away in the heat of the noonday sum.

Worry, however, is not only an effect. It is
also a cause. Worry causes worry. It breeds
more rapidly than do flies. The more one worries
the more he learns to worry. Begin to worry over
one thing and soon you are worrying about twenty.
And the infernal curse is not content with breeding
worries of its own kind. It is as if it were a
parent gifted with the power of breeding a score, a
hundred different kinds of progeny at one birth, each
more hideous, repulsive, and fearful than the other.
There is no palliation, temporization, or parleying
possible with such a monster. Death is the only
way to be released from him, and it is your death
or his. His death is a duty God requires at your
hands. Why, then, waste time? Start now and
kill the foul fiend as quickly as you can.

CHAPTER II

Page 11

OURS IS THE AGE OF WORRY

How insulting! What a ridiculous statement!
How ignorant of our achievements! I can well
imagine some of my readers saying when they see this
chapter heading. This, an age of worry!
Why this is the age of progress, of advancement, of
uplift, of the onward march of a great and wonderful
civilization.

Is it?

Certainly it is! See what we have done in electricity,
look at the telephone, telegraph, wireless and now
the wireless telephone. See our advancement in
mechanics,—­the automobile, the new locomotives,
vessels, etc. See our conquest of the air—­dirigibles,
aeroplanes, hydroplanes and the like.

Yes! I see, and what of it? We have done,
our advancement, our conquest, etc.,
etc. Yes! I see we have not lessened
our arrogance, our empty-headed pride,
our boasting. We—­Why “we”?

What have you and I had to do with the new inventions
in electricity or mechanics or the conquest of the
air?

Not one single, solitary thing! The progress
of the world has been made through the efforts of
a few solitary, exceptional, rare individuals, not
by the combined efforts of us all. You and I are
as common, unprogressive, uninventive, indifferent
mediocrities as we—­the common people—­always
were. We have not contributed one iota to all
this progress, and I often question whether mud; of
it comes to us more fraught with good than evil.
We claim the results without engaging in the work.
We use the ’phone and worry because Central
doesn’t get us our connections immediately, when
we haven’t the faintest conception of how the
connection is gained, or why we are delayed.
We ride on the fast train, but chafe and worry ourselves
and everybody about us to a frazzle because we are
stopped on a siding by a semaphore of a block station
which we never have observed, and would not understand
if we did. We reap but have not sowed, gather
but have not strewed, and that is ever injurious and
never beneficial. Our conceit is flattered and
enlarged, our importance magnified, our “dignity”—­God
save the mark!—­made more impressive, and
as a result, we are more the target for the inconsequential
worries of life. We worry if we are not flattered,
if our importance is not recognized even by strangers,
and our dignity not honored—­in other words
we worry that we are not kow-towed to, deferred
to, respectfully greeted on every hand and made to
feel that civilization, progress and advancement are
materially furthered and enhanced by our mere existence.

Every individual with such an outlook on life is a
prolific distributer of worry germs; he, she, is a
pest and a nuisance, more disturbing to the real peace
of the community than a victim of smallpox, and one
who should be isolated in a pest-house. But,
unfortunately, our myopic vision sees only the wealth,
the luxury, the spending capacity of such an individual,
and that ends it—­we bow down and worship
before the golden calf.

Page 12

If I had the time in these pages to discuss the history
of worry, I am assured I could show clearly to the
student of history that worry is always the product
of prosperity; that while a nation is hard at work
at its making, and every citizen is engaged in arduous
labor of one kind or another for the upbuilding of
his own or the national power, worry is scarcely known.
The builders of our American civilization were too
busy conquering the wilderness of New England, the
prairies of the Middle West, the savannahs and lush
growths of the South, the arid deserts of the West
to have much time for worry. Such men and women
were gifted with energy, the power of initiative and
executive ability, they were forceful, daring, courageous
and active, and in their very working had neither
time nor thought for worry.

But just as soon as a reasonable amount of success
attended their efforts, and they had amassed wealth
their children began and continued to worry.
Not occupied with work that demands our unceasing
energy, we find ourselves occupied with trifles, worrying
over our health, our investments, our luxuries, our
lap-dogs and our frivolous occupations. Imagine
the old-time pioneers of the forest, plain, prairie
and desert worrying about sitting in a draught, or
taking cold if they got wet, or wondering whether
they could eat what would be set before them at the
next meal. They were out in the open, compelled
to take whatever weather came to them, rain or shine,
hot or cold, sleet or snow, and ready when the sunset
hour came, to eat with relish and appetite sauce,
the rude and plain victuals placed upon the table.

Compare the lives of that class of men with the later
generation of “capitalists.” I know
one who used to live at Sherry’s in New York.
His apartments were as luxurious as those of a monarch;
he was not happy, however, for worry rode him from
morning to night. He absolutely spent an hour
or more each day consulting the menu, or discussing
with the steward what he could have to place upon his
menu, and died long before his time, cursed with his
wealth, its resultant idleness and the trifling worries
that always come to such men. Had he been reduced
to poverty, compelled to go out and work on a farm,
eat oatmeal mush or starve for breakfast, bacon and
greens for dinner, and cold pork and potatoes or starve
for supper, he would be alive and happy to-day.

Take the fussy, nervous, irritable, worrying men and
women of life, who poke their noses into other people’s
affairs, retail all the scandal, and hand on all the
slander and gossip of empty and, therefore, evil minds.
They are invariably well to do and without any work
or responsibilities. They go gadding about restless
and feverish because of the empty vacuity of their
lives, a prey to worry because they have nothing else
to do. If I were to put down and faithfully report
the conversations I have with such people; the fool
worries they are really distressed with; the labor,
time and energy they spend on following chimeras,
will o’ the wisps, mirages that beckon to them
and promise a little mental occupation,—­and
over which they cannot help but worry, one could scarcely
believe it.

Page 13

As Dr. Walton forcefully says in his admirable booklet:

The present, then, is the age, and our
contemporaries are the people, that bring into
prominence the little worries, that cause the
tempest in the teapot, that bring about the worship
of the intangible, and the magnification of the
unessential. If we had lived in another epoch
we might have dreamt of the eternal happiness
of saving our neck, but in this one we fret because
our collar does not fit it, and because the button
that holds the collar has rolled under the bureau.[A]

I am not so foolish as to imagine for one moment that
I can correct the worrying tendency of the age, but
I do want to be free from worry myself, to show others
that it is unnecessary and needless, and also, that
it is possible to live a life free from its demoralizing
and altogether injurious influences.

CHAPTER III

NERVOUS PROSTRATION AND WORRY.

Nervous prostration is generally understood to mean
weakness of the nerves. It invariably comes to
those who have extra strong nerves, but who do not
know how to use them properly, as well as those whose
nervous system is naturally weak and easily disorganized.
Nervous prostration is a disease of overwork, mainly
mental overwork, and in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, comes from worry. Worry is the most
senseless and insane form of mental work. It is
as if a bicycle-rider were so riding against time
that, the moment after he got off his machine to sit
down to a meal he sprang up again, and while eating
were to work his arms and legs as if he were riding.
It is the slave-driver that stands over the slave and
compels him to continue his work, even though he is
so exhausted that hands, arms and legs cease to obey,
and he falls asleep at his task.

The folly, as well as the pain and distress of this
cruel slave-driving is that we hold the whip over
ourselves, have trained ourselves to do it, and have
done it so long that now we seem unable to stop.
In another chapter there is fully described (in Dorothy
Canfield’s vivid words) the squirrel-cage whirligig
of modern society life. Modern business life
is not much better. Men compel themselves to
the endless task of amassing money without knowing
why they amass it. They make money, that
they may enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs,
to get more money, to enlarge their factories, to make
more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge more factories,
to make more ploughs, and so on, ad infinitum.
Where is the sense of it. Such conduct has well
been termed money-madness. It is an obsession,
a disease, a form of hypnotism, a mental malady.

Page 14

The tendency of the age is to drive. We drive
our own children to school; there they are driven
for hours by one study after another; even when they
come home they bring lessons with them—­the
lovers of study and over-conscientious because they
want to do them, and the laggards because they must,
if they are to keep up with their classes. If
the parents of such children are not careful, they
(the children) soon learn to worry; they are behind-hand
with their lessons; they didn’t get the highest
mark yesterday; the class is going ahead of them,
etc., etc., until mental collapse comes.

For worrying is the worst kind of mental overwork.
As Dr. Edward Livingston Hunt, of Columbia University,
New York, said in a paper read by him early in 1912,
before the Public Health Education Committee of the
Medical Society of the County of New York:

There is a form of overwork, exceedingly
common and exceedingly disastrous—­one
which equally accompanies great intellectual labors
and minor tasks. I allude to worry. When
we medical men speak of the workings of the brain
we make use of a term both expressive and characteristic.
It is to cerebrate. To cerebrate means to
think, to reason, and to reach conclusions; it
means to concentrate and to work hard. To
think, then, is to cerebrate. To worry is to cerebrate
intensely.

Worry is overwork of the most disastrous
kind; it means to drive the mental machinery at
an unreasonable and dangerous rate. Worry
gives the brain no rest, but rather keeps the delicate
cells in constant and continuous action. Work
is wear; worry is tear. Overwork, mental
strain, and worry lead to a diminution of nerve
force and to a prostration of the vital forces
and causes a degeneracy of the blood vessels of the
brain.

Exhaustion, another name for fatigue,
may show itself either in the form of physical
collapse, so that the patient lacks resistance,
and, becoming anemic and run down, falls a prey to
any and every little ailment, or in the form of mental
collapse. An exhausted brain then gives way
to depression, to fears, and to anxiety.

The vast majority of nervous breakdowns
are avoidable; they are the result of our own
excesses and of the disregard we show toward the
ordinary laws of health and hygiene; they are the
results of the tremendous demands which are made upon
us by modern life; they are the result of the
strenuous life.

From this analysis, made by an expert, it is evident
that worry and nervous prostration are but two points
on the same circle. Nervous prostration causes
worry, and worry causes nervous prostration. Those
who overwork their bodies and minds—­who
drive themselves either with the cares of business,
the amassing of wealth, yielding to the demands of
society, the cravings of ambition, or the pursuit of
pleasure, are alike certain to suffer the results
of mental overwork.

Page 15

And here let me interject what to me has become a
fundamental principle upon which invariably I rely.
It will be recalled what I have said elsewhere of
selfish and unselfish occupations.
It is the selfish occupations that produce nerve-exhaustion.
Those that are unselfish seldom result in the disturbance
of the harmony or equilibrium of our nature—­whether
we regard it as physical, mental, or spiritual.
This may seem to be a trancendental statement—­perhaps
it is. But I am confidently assured of its essential
truth. That man or woman who is truly engaged
in an unselfish work—­a work that is for
the good of others—­has a right to look for,
to expect and to receive from the great All Source
of strength, power and serenity all that is needed
to keep the body, mind and soul in harmony, consequently
in perfect health and free from worry.

Hence the apparent paradox that, if you would care
for yourself you must disregard yourself in your loving
care for others.

One great reason why worry produces nervous prostration
is that it induces insomnia.

Worry and sleeplessness are twin sisters. As
one has well said: “Refreshing sleep and
vexing thoughts are deadly foes.” Health
and happiness often disappear from those who fail
to sleep, for sleep, indeed, is “tired Nature’s
sweet restorer,” as Young in his Night Thoughts
termed it. Shakspere never wrote anything truer
when he said:

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d
sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore
labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature’s
second course,
Chief nourisher of life’s feast.

Even the Bible makes sleep one of the special blessings
of God, for we are told that “He giveth His
beloved sleep.” The sacred book contains
many references to sleeplessness and its causes.

Undoubtedly most potent among these causes is worry.
The worrier retires to his bed at the usual hour,
but his brain is busy—­it is working overtime.
What is it doing? Is it thinking over things
that are to be done, and planning for the future?
If so, there is a legitimate excuse, for as soon as
the plan is laid, rest will come, and he will sleep.
Is he thinking over the mistakes of the past and sensibly
and wisely taking counsel from them? If so, he
will speedily come to a decision, and then sleep will
bring grateful oblivion. Is he thinking joyful
thoughts? These will bring a natural feeling of
harmony with all things, and that is conducive to speedy
sleep? Is he thinking of how he may help others?
That is equally soothing to nerves, brain and body,
and brings the refreshment of forgetfulness.

Page 16

But no! the worrier has another method. He thinks
the same thoughts over and over again, without the
slightest attempt to get anywhere. He has thrashed
them out before, so often that he can tell exactly
what each thought will lead to. His ideas go
around in a circle like the horse tied to the wheel.
He is on a treadmill ever ascending, tramping, up,
up, up and up, and still up, but the wheel falls down
each time as far as he steps up, and after hours and
hours of unceasing, wracking, distressful mental labor,
he has done absolutely nothing, has not progressed
one inch, is still in the clutch of the same vicious
treadmill. Brain weary, nerve weary, is there
any wonder that he rolls and tosses, throws over his
pillow, kicks off the clothes, groans, almost cries
aloud in his agony of longing for rest. Poor
victim of worry and sleeplessness, how I long to help
you get rid of your evil habit and save others from
falling into it. For both worry and sleeplessness
are habits, easily gained, and once gained very hard
to get rid of, yet both unnecessary, needless, and
foolish. The worry that produces sleeplessness
is merciless; so merciless and relentless that no
fierce torture of a Black-hander can be described
that is worse in its long continuing and evil results.
Lives are wrecked, brains shattered, happiness destroyed
by this monstrous evil, and many a man and woman fastens
it upon himself, herself, through indulging in anxious
thought, or by yielding to that equal devil-dragon
of self-pity.

David the psalmist graphically tells of his own case:

I am weary with my groaning;
Every night make I my bed to swim;
I water my couch with my tears,
Mine eye wasteth away because of grief.
Ps. VI. 6:7.

At another time he cries

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, and
from the words
of my groaning?
Oh my God, I cry in the day time, but
thou answereth not;
And in the night season, I am not silent.
Ps. XXII. 1:2.

Yet God heard him not until his groaning and self-pity
were cast aside, until he rested in God, trusted in
Him. Then came rest, as he graphically expresses
it:

I laid me down and slept;
I awaked; for Jehovah sustaineth me. Ps.
III. 5.

In peace will I both lay me down and sleep:
For thou, Jehovah, alone maketh me dwell
in safety. Ps. IV. 8.

I have set Jehovah always before me:
Because he is at my right hand, I shall
not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory
rejoiceth:
My flesh also shall dwell in safety. Ps.
XVI. 8:9.

And where the heart is glad, and one rejoiceth in
the sense of peace and safety, sweet sleep lays its
soothing hand upon the work-worn brain and body, tired
with the labors of the day, and brings rest, repose,
recuperation.

Page 17

CHAPTER IV

HOLY WRIT, THE SAGES, AND WORRY

Our civilization is called a Christian civilization.
We are the Christian nations. Yet, as
I have shown in Chapters I and II, ours is the worrying
civilization. That worry is dishonoring to our
civilization, and especially to our professions as
Christians is self-evident. Let us then look
briefly in the book we call our Holy Bible, our Guide
of Life, our Director to Salvation, and see what the
sacred writers have to say upon this subject.
If they commend it, we may assume that it will be
safe to worry. If they rebuke or reprobate it
we may be equally assured that we have no right to
indulge in it.

St. Paul seemed to have a very clear idea of worry
when he said:

Be careful—­[full
of care]—­for nothing, but in everything
by
prayer and supplication, with
thanksgiving, make your requests
known unto God. Philippians
4:6.

How inclusive this is—­full of care, anxiety,
fretfulness, worry about nothing, but in everything
presenting your case to God. And then comes the
promise:

And the peace of God which
passeth all understanding shall
keep your hearts and minds
in Christ Jesus. Phil. IV. 7.

How clear, definite, full and satisfactory. What
room for worry is there in a heart full of the peace
of God, which passeth all understanding? And
oh, how much to be desired is such an experience.

Browning, in his Abt Vogler, sings practically
the same sweet song where he says:

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow
to clear,
Each sufferer says his says, his scheme
of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers
in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis
we musicians know.

If God whispers in the ear of the sufferer, the doubter,
the distressed, the worried, the peace must come;
and if peace come, it matters not what others’
reasoning may bring to them, the knowledge that God
has whispered is enough; it brings satisfaction, content,
serenity, peace. The opposite of worry is rest,
faith, trust, peace. How full the Bible is of
promises of rest to those who know and love God and
his ways of right-doing. Mendlessohn took the
incitement of the psalmist (Psalm 37:7), “Rest
in the Lord, and wait patiently for him,” and
made of it one of the tenderest, sweetest songs of
all time. Full of yearning over the worried,
the distressed, the music itself seems to brood in
sympathetic and soothing power, as a mother croons
to her fretful child: “Why fret, why worry,—­No,
no! rest, rest my little one, in the love of the all-Father,”
and many a weary, fretful, worried heart has found
rest and peace while listening to this sweet and beautiful
song.

There is still another passage in holy writ that the
perpetual worrier should read and ponder. It
is the prophet Isaiah’s assurance that God says
to His children: “As one whom his mother
comforteth, so will I comfort you.”

Page 18

Who has not seen a fretful, sick child taken up by
a loving mother, yield to her soothing influence in
a few minutes and drop off into restful, healthful,
restoring sleep. What a wonderful and forceful
figure of speech, illustrative of a never-ceasing fact
that the Spirit of all good, the supreme Force of
Love and Power in the universe is looking, watching,
without slumber or sleep, untiring, unfailing, ever
ready to give soothing comfort as does the mother,
to those who fret and worry.

Then, when cause for worry seems to be ever present,
why not call upon this Loving Maternal Soothing Power?
Why not rest in His arms, and thus find peace, poise
and serenity?

How much worry comes from fear as to the future.
Men become hoarders, savers, misers, or work themselves
beyond healthful endurance, or shut out the daily
joys of existence in their business absorption, because
they dread poverty in their old age. “Wise
provision” becomes a driving monster, worrying
them into a restless, fretful energy that must be
accumulating all the time.

Two thousand years ago this trait of human nature
was so strongly manifested that Christ felt called
upon to restrain and rebuke it. What a wonderful
sermon He preached. It is worth while repeating
it here, and wise would that man, that woman be, who
is worried about to-morrow, were he, she, to read
it daily. I give it in the revised version:

I say unto you, Be not anxious for your
life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink;
nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.
Is not the life more than the food, and the body than
the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that
they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather
into barns; and your Heavenly Father feedeth them.
Are not ye of much more value than they?
And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit
unto his stature? And why are ye anxious concerning
raiment? Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they toil not, neither do they
spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field,
which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the
oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye
of little faith? Be not therefore anxious,
saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?
or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after
all these things do the Gentiles seek; for your
heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things. But seek ye first his kingdom,
and his righteousness; and all these things shall be
added unto you. Be not therefore anxious for
the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious
for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof. Matthew, 6:25-34.

Here is the wisest philosophy. Anxiety is suicide,
peace is life; worry destroys, serenity upbuilds.
As you want to live, to grow, possess your souls in
peace and serenity. Work, aye, work mightily,

Page 19

powerfully, daily, but work for the joy of it, not
because worry drives you to it. Work persistently,
consistently and worthily, because no man can live—­or
ought to live—­without it, but do not let
work be your slave driver, your relentless master,
urging you on to drudgery, bondage to your counter,
ledger or factory, until you drop exhausted and lifeless.
Work for the real joy of it, and then, filled with
the blessed trust in God the all-Father expressed as
above by Christ, throw your cares to the winds, bid
your worries depart, and accept what comes with serenity,
peace and thankfulness.

Many proverbs have been written about worry, which
it may be well to recall. Certainly it can do
no harm to those who worry to see how their mental
habit has been regarded, and is still regarded, by
the concentrated wisdom of the ages.

An old proverb says: “It is not work, but
worry, that kills.” How true this is.
Congenial work is a health-bringer, a necessity for
a normal life, a joy; it keeps the body in order,
promotes digestion, induces the sleep of perfect restoration
and is one of man’s greatest blessings.
But worry brings dis-ease (want of ease), discomfort,
wretchedness, promotes evil secretions which upset
the normal workings of the body, and is a constant
banisher and disturber of sleep.

Still another proverb says: “Worry killed
the cat.” Many people read this and fail
to see its profound significance. It must be remembered
that in “the good old days,” when this
proverb was most rife, the superstitious held that
a cat had nine lives. Now, surely, the
deep meaning of the proverb is made apparent.
Though the cat were possessed of nine lives, worry
would surely kill them all—­either one by
one, by its horrid and determined persistence; or
all at once, by the concentrated virulence of its
power.

There are many proverbs to the effect that “When
worry comes in, wit flies out,” and these are
all true. Worry unsettles the mind, unbalances
the judgment, induces fever of the intellect, which
renders calm, cool weighing of matters impossible.
No man of great achievements ever worried during his
period of greatness. Had he done so his greatness
could never have been achieved. Imagine a general
trying to solve the vexing problems of a great combat
which is going against him, with his mind beset by
numberless worries. He must concentrate all
his energies upon the one thing. If worry
occupies his attention, wit, sense, judgment, discretion,
wisdom are crowded out, have no place.

All the pictures given to us of Grant show him the
most imperturbable at the most trying times.
When the fortunes of war seemed most against him he
was the most cheerful, the least disturbed. He
had learned the danger of worry, and compelled it
to flee from him, that calm judgment and clear-headed
decisions might be his.

If, therefore, these great ones of earth found it
essential to their well-being to banish worry, how
much more is it necessary that we of the ordinary
mass of mankind, of the commoner herd, apply ourselves
to the gaining of the same kind of wisdom.

Page 20

An old countrywoman once said in my hearing:
“Worry, and you hug a hornet’s nest.”
How suggestive both of the stinging that was sure to
come and the folly, the absurdity, the cruelty to oneself
of the act.

The great Scotch philosopher, Blair, said: “Worry
(or anxiety) is the poison of human life,” and
how true it is. How biting, how corroding, how
destructive to life some poisons are, working speedily,
suddenly, awfully. Others there are that have
a cumulative effect, until life itself cannot bear
the strain, and it goes out. Recently I was at
a home where a son was so worried over conditions
that he felt ought not to exist between his parents,
that he totally collapsed, mentally, and for a time
was in danger of losing his reason. The folly
of his attitude is apparent to everyone but himself,
though he now seeks in the absorbing occupation of
teaching, to free himself from the poison of worry
that was speedily destroying his reason.

Henry Labouchere, the sage who for so many years has
edited the London Truth, once wrote a couplet,
that is as true as anything he ever wrote:

They who live in a worry,
Invite death in a hurry.

I want to be ready for death when it comes, but as
yet I am not extending an invitation to the gentleman
with the scythe. Are you, my worrying reader,
anxious to be mowed down before your time? Quit
your worrying, and don’t urge the Master Reaper
to harvest you in until He is sure you are ready.

Another sage once said: “To worry about
to-morrow is to be unhappy to-day,” and the
same thought is put into: “Never howl till
you are hit,” and the popular proverb attributed
erroneously to Lincoln for it was long in use before
Lincoln’s time: “Do not cross the
stream until you get to it.” Christ put
the same thought into his Sermon on the Mount, when
He said: “Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof.” How utterly foolish and
wrong it is to spoil to-day by fretting and worrying
over the possible evils of to-morrow. Many a man
in business has ruined himself by allowing worries
about to-morrow to prevent him from doing the needful
work of to-day. The rancher who sits down and
worries because he fears it will not rain to-morrow,
or it will rain, fails to do the work of to-day ready
for whatever the morrow may bring forth. The
wise Roman, Seneca, expressed the same thing in other
words when he wrote: “He grieves more than
is necessary who grieves before it is necessary,”
and our own Lowell had a similar thought in mind which
he expressed as follows: “The misfortunes
hardest to bear are those which never come.”
Even the Chinese saw the folly of worrying over events
that have not yet transpired, for they have a saying:
“To what purpose should a person throw himself
into the water before the boat is cast away (wrecked).”

All these proverbs, therefore, show that the wisdom
of the ages is against worrying over things that have
not yet transpired. Let to-morrow take care of
itself. Live to-day. As Cardinal Newman’s
wonderful hymn expresses it:

Page 21

I do not ask to see the distant scene,
One step enough for me.

Furthermore, the evil we dread for to-morrow may never
come. Every man’s experience demonstrates
this. The bill for which he has not money in
the bank is met by the unexpected payment of an account
overdue, or not yet due. Hence if fears come of
the morrow, if we are tempted to worry about a grief
that seems to be approaching, let us resolutely cast
the temptation aside, and by a full occupation of
mind and body in the work of the “now,”
engage ourselves beyond the possibility of hearing
the voice of the tempter.

When one considers the words that are regarded as
synonymous with “worry,” or that are related
to it, he sees what cruelties lurk in the facts behind
the words. To grieve, fret, pine, mourn, bleed,
chafe, yearn, droop, sink, give way to despair, all
belong to the category of worry.

Phrases like “to sit on thorns,” “to
be on pins and needles,” “to drain the
cup of misery to the dregs,” show with graphic
power the folly and curse of worry. Why should
one sit on thorns, or on pins and needles? If
one does so accidentally he arises in a hurry, yet
in worrying, one seems deliberately, with intent, to
sit down upon prickles in order to compel himself
to discomfort, distress, and pain. Is there any
wisdom, when one has the cup of misery at his lips,
in deliberately keeping it there, and persistently
drinking it to the “very dregs”?
One unconsciously feels like shouting to the drinker:
“Put it down, you fool!” and if the harsh
command be not instantly obeyed, rushing up and dashing
it out of the drinker’s hand.

Take a few more words and look at them, and see how
closely they are related to worry,—­to be
displeased, fretted, annoyed, incommoded, discomposed,
troubled, disquieted, crossed, teased, fretted, irked,
vexed, grieved, afflicted, distressed, plagued, bothered,
pestered, bored, harassed, perplexed, haunted.
These things worry does to those who yield themselves
to its noxious power.

Is it not apparent, then, that the only course open
for a sensible man or woman is to

QUIT WORRYING.

CHAPTER V

THE NEEDLESSNESS AND USELESSNESS OF WORRY

Page 22

Of all the mental occupations fallen into, invented,
or discovered by man, the most needless, futile, and
useless of all is the occupation of worry. We
have heard it said often, when one was speaking of
another’s work, or something he had done:
“He ought to be in a better business.”
So, in every case, can it be said of the worrier:
He’s in a bad business; a business that ought
not to exist, one without a single redeeming feature.
If for no other reason the fact implied by the title
of this chapter ought to be sufficient to condemn it.
Worry is needless, useless, futile, of none effect.
Why push a heavy rock up a mountain side merely to
have it roll down again? Yet one might find good
in the physical development that came from this needless
uphill work. And he might laugh, and sing, and
be cheery while he was doing it. But in the case
of the worrier he not only pushes the rock up the
hill, but he is beset with the dread that, every moment,
it is going to roll back and kill him, and he thinks
of nothing but the fear, and the strain, and the distress.

When one calmly considers, it is almost too ridiculous
to write seriously about the needlessness and uselessness
of worry; its futility is so self-evident to an intelligent
mind. Yet, because so many otherwise intelligent
and good people are cursed by it, it seems necessary
to show its utter uselessness. These say:
“I would stop worrying if I could; but I can’t
help it; I worry in spite of myself!”

Don’t you believe it! You doubtless think
your statement is true, but it is nothing of the kind.
Worry could find no place in your mind if it was full
to overflowing with something really useful and beneficial.
It is a proof either that your mind bosses you,—­in
other words, that you cannot direct it to think upon
something worth while, that it is absolutely untrained,
undisciplined, uncontrolled,—­or that it
is so empty, it takes to worry as a refuge against
its own vacuity. The fact of worry implies either
that the worrier has no control over his mind, or
has an empty mind.

Now no intelligent person will, for one moment, confess
to such weakness of mind that he has no control over
it. An unoccupied mind can always be occupied
if one so wills. No human being is so constituted
that nothing appeals to him or interests him, so every
mind can be awakened and filled with contemplation
of good things—­things that will help, benefit
and bless, if he so desires.

In the Foreword I have referred to my own experience.
Many who knew some of the facts and saw the change
that came over my life, have asked me how I
succeeded in eliminating worry. I refused to allow
my mind to dwell upon harassing topics or events in
my life. If I awoke during the night, I turned
on the light and picked up a book and forced my thought
into another channel. If the objectionable thoughts
obtruded during the day I did one of many things, as,
for instance, turned to my work with a frenzy of absorption;
picked up my hat and went for a walk; called upon
friends; went to a concert; or a vaudeville show;
took in a lecture; stood and watched the crowds; visited
the railway stations—­anything, everything,
but dwell upon the subjects that were tabooed.

Page 23

Here was a simple and practical remedy, and I found
it worked well. But I can now see that there
was a much better way. Where good is substituted
for evil one has “the perfect way,” and
the Apostle Paul revealed himself a wise man of practical
affairs, when he urged his readers to “think
on the things” that are lovely, pure, just, and
of good report. In my case I merely sought to
prevent mental vacuity so that the seven devils of
worry could not rush into, and take possession of,
my empty mind; but I was indifferent, somewhat, to
the kind of thought or mental occupation that was
to keep out the thoughts of worry. A Nick Carter
detective story was as good as a Browning poem, and
sometimes better; a cheap and absurd show than an uplifting
lecture or concert. How much better it would have
been could I have had my mind so thoroughly under
control—­and this control can surely be
gained by any and every man, woman, and child that
lives,—­that, when worrying thoughts obtruded,
I could have said immediately and with authoritative
power: I will to think on this thing, or that,
or the other. The result would have been an immediate
and perfect cessation of the worry that disturbed,
fretted, and destroyed, for the mind would have become
engaged with something that was beneficial and helpful.
And remember this: God is good, and it is His
pleasure to help those who are seeking to help themselves.
Or to put it in a way that even our agnostic friends
can receive, Nature is on the side of the man or woman
who is seeking to live naturally, that is, rightly.
Hence, substitute good thoughts for the worrying thoughts
and the latter will fade away as do the mist and fog
before the morning sun.

Here, then, I had clearly demonstrated for myself
the needlessness of worry: I could prevent
it if I would. And my readers cannot too soon
gain this positive assurance. They can,
if they will. It is simply a question
of wanting to be free earnestly enough to work for
freedom. Is freedom from worry worth while; is
it worth struggling for? To me, it is one of
the great blessings of life that worry is largely,
if not entirely, eliminated. I would not go back
to the old worrying days for all the wealth of Morgan,
Rockefeller, and Carnegie combined.

As for the uselessness of worry; who is there, that
has studied the action of worry, that ever found any
of the problems it was concerned over improved by
all the hours of worry devoted to it. Worry never
solved a problem yet; worry muddies the water still
further instead of clearing it; worry adds to the
tangle instead of releasing it; worry beclouds the
mind, prevents sane judgment, confuses the reason,
and leads one to decisions that never ought to be
made, and so to an uncertainty, as vexatious and irritating
as is the original problem to be solved. If the
worry pointed a way out of the difficulty I would
extol worry and regard it as a bitter draught of medicine,
to be swallowed in a hurry, but producing a beneficial
result. But it never does anything to help; it
invariably hinders; it sets one chasing shadows, produces
ignes fatui before the eyes, and ultimately
leads one into the bog.

Page 24

Elsewhere I have referred to the Indians’ attitude
of mind. If a matter can be changed, change it;
if not grin and bear it without complaint. Here
is practical wisdom. But to worry over a thing
that can be changed, instead of changing it, is the
height of folly, and if a matter cannot be changed
why worry over it? How utterly useless is the
worry. Then, too, worry is the parent of nagging.
Nagging is worry put into words,—­the verbal
expression of worry about or towards individuals.
The mother wishes her son would do differently.
Can the boy’s actions be changed? Then
go to work to change them—­not to worry
over them. If they cannot be changed, why nag
him, why irritate him, why make a bad matter worse?
Nagging, like worry, never once did one iota of good;
it has caused infinite harm, as it sets up an irritation
between those whose love might overcome the difficulty
if it were let alone. Nagging is the constant
irritation of a wound, the rubbing of a sore, the
salting an abraded place, the giving a hungry man a
tract, religious advice or a bible, when all he craves
is food.

Ah, mother! many a boy has run away from home because
your worry led you to nag him; many a girl to-day
is on the streets because father or mother nagged
her; many a husband has “gone on a tear”
because he could not face his wife’s “worry
put into words,” even though no one would attempt
to deny that boy, girl and husband alike were wrong
in every particular, and the “nagger”
in the right, save in the one thing of worry and its
consequent nagging.

In watching the lives of men and women I have been
astonished, again and again, that the fruitlessness
of their worry did not demonstrate its uselessness
to them. No good ever comes from it. Everybody
who has any perception sees this, agrees to it, confesses
it. Then why still persist in it? Yet they
do, and at the same time expect to be regarded as
intelligent, sane, normal human beings, many of whom
claim, as members of churches, peculiar and close
kinship with God, forgetful of the fact that every
moment spent in worry is dishonoring to God.

How much needless anxiety, care, and absolute torture
some women suffer in an insane desire to keep their
homes spotlessly clean. The house must be without
a speck of dirt anywhere; the kitchen must be as spotless
as the parlor; the sink must be so immaculate that
you could eat from it, if necessary; the children
must always be in their best bibs and tuckers and
appear as Little Lord Fauntleroys; and no one, at
any time, or any circumstance, must ever appear to
be dirty, except the scavenger who comes to remove
the accumulated debris of the kitchen, and the man
who occasionally assists the gardener.

Page 25

These people forget that all dirt and dust is not
of greater value than spotless cleanliness. Let
us look calmly at the problem for a few minutes.
Here is a housewife who cannot afford help to keep
her house as spotless as her instincts and her training
desire. It is simply impossible for her, personally,
to go over the house daily with rag, duster and dustpan.
If she attempts it, as she does sometimes—­she
overworks, and a breakdown is the result. What,
then, is the sensible, the reasonable, the only thing
she should do? Sit down and “worry”
over her “untidy house”; lament that “the
stairs have not been swept since day before yesterday;
that the parlor was not dusted this morning; the music-room
looks simply awful,” and cry that “if Mrs.
Brown were to come in and see my wretchedly untidy
house, I’m sure I should die of shame!”
Would this help matters? Would one speck of dirt
be removed as the result of the worry, the wailing,
and the tears? Not a speck. Every particle
would remain just as before.

Yet other things would not be as they were before.
No woman could feel as I have suggested this “worriting
creature” felt, without gendering irritation
in husband, children and friends. Is any house
that was ever built worth the alienation of dear ones?
What is the dust, dirt, disorder, of a really untidy
house—­I am supposing an extraordinary case—­compared
with the irritation caused by a worrying housewife?

Furthermore: such a woman is almost sure to break
down her own health and become an irritable neurasthenic
or hypochondriac, and thus add to the burdens of those
she loves.

There are women who, instead of following this course,
make themselves wretched—­and everyone else
around them—­by the worry of contrasting
their lot with that of some one more fortunately situated
than they. She has a husband who earns more
money than does hers; such an one has a larger allowance
and can afford more help—­the worry, however,
is the same, little matter what form it takes, and
worry is the destructive thing.

What, then, shall a woman do, who has to face the
fact that she cannot gratify her desire to keep her
house immaculate, either because she has not the strength
to do it, or the money to hire it done. The old
proverb will help her: “What can’t
be cured must be endured.” There is wonderful
help in the calm, full, direct recognition of unpleasant
facts. Look them squarely in the face. Don’t
dodge them, don’t deny them. Know them,
understand them, then defy them to destroy your happiness.
If you can’t dust your house daily, dust it thrice
a week, or twice, or once, and determine that you
will be happy in spite of the dust. The real
comfort of the house need not thereby be impaired,
as there is a vast difference between your scrupulous
cleanliness and careless untidiness. Things may
be in order even though the floor has a little extra
dust on, or the furniture has not been dusted for four
days.

Page 26

“But,” you say, “I am far less disturbed
by the over work than I am by the discomfort that
comes from the dust.” Then all I can say
is that you are wrongly balanced, according to my
notion of things. Your health should be of far
more value to you than your ideas of house tidiness,
but you have reversed the importance of the two.
Teach yourself the relative value of things.
A hundred dollar bill is of greater value than one
for five dollars, and the life of your baby more important
than the value of the hundred dollar bill. Put
first things first, and secondly, and tertiary, and
quarternary things in their relative positions.
Your health and self-poise should come first, the
comfort and happiness of husband and family next, the
more or less spotlessness and tidiness of the house
afterwards. Then, if you cannot have your house
as tidy as you wish, resolutely resolve that you will
not be disturbed. You will control your own life
and not allow a dusty room—­be it never
so dusty—­to destroy your comfort and peace
of mind, and that of your loved ones.

When a woman of this worrying type has children she
soon learns that she must choose between the health
and happiness of her children and the gratification
of her own passionate desire for spotless cleanliness.
This gratification, if permanently indulged in, soon
becomes a disease, for surely only a diseased mind
can value the spotlessness of a house more than the
health, comfort, and happiness of children. Yet
many women do—­more’s the pity.
Such poor creatures should learn that there is a dirtiness
that is far worse than dirt in a house—­a
dirtiness, a muddiness of mind, a cluttering of thought,
a making of the mind a harboring place for wrong thoughts.
Not wrong in the sense of immoral or wicked, as these
words are generally used, but wrong in this sense,
viz., that reason shows the folly, the inutility,
the impracticability of attempting to bring up sane,
healthy, happy, normal children in a household controlled
by the idea that spotless cleanliness is the matter
of prime importance to be observed. The discomfort
of children, husband, mother herself are nothing as
compared with keeping the house in perfect order.
Any woman so obsessed should be sent for a short time
to an insane asylum, for she certainly has so reversed
the proper order of values as to be so far insane.
She has “cluttered up” her mind with a
wrong idea, an idea which dirties, muddies, soils
her mind far worse than dust soils her house.

Reader, keep your mind free from such dirt—­for
dirt is but “matter in the wrong place.”
Far better have dust, dirt, in your house, dirt on
your child’s hands, face, and clothes, than on
your own mind to give you worry, discomfort and disease.

CHAPTER VI THE SELFISHNESS OF WORRY

Page 27

If worry merely affected the one who worries it might
be easier, in many cases, to view worry with equanimity
and calmness. But, unfortunately, in the disagreeable
features of life, far more than the agreeable, the
aphorism of the apostolic writer, “No man liveth
unto himself,” seems to be more than ordinarily
true. It is one proof of the selfishness of the
“worrier”—­whether consciously
or unconsciously I do not say—­that he never
keeps his worry to himself. He must always “out
with it.” The nervous mother worrying about
her baby shows it even to the unconscious child at
her breast. When the child is older she still
shows it, until the little one knows as well as it
knows when the sun is shining that “mother is
worrying again.” The worrying wife does
not keep her worry to herself; she pours it out to,
or upon, her husband. The worrying husband is
just the same. If it is the wife that causes
him to worry—­or to think so—­he
pours out his worry in turbulent words, thus adding
fuel to a fire already too hot for comfort.

It is one of the chief characteristics of worry that
it is seldom confined to the breast of its victim.
It loses its power, too often, when shut up.
It must find expression in looks, in tone of voice,
in sulkiness, in dumps, in nagging or in a voicing
of its woes.

It is in this voicing of itself that worry demonstrates
its inherent selfishness. If father, mother,
wife, friends, neighbors, anybody can give
help, pleasure, joy, instruction, profit, their voices
are always heard with delight. If they have reasonable
cautions to give to those they love, who seem to them
to be thoughtless, regardless of danger which they
see or fear, or even foolhardy, let them speak out
bravely, courageously, lovingly, and they will generally
be listened to. But to have them voice their
fretful, painful, distressing worries no one is benefitted,
and both speaker and the one spoken to are positively
harmed. For an unnecessary fear voiced is strengthened;
it is made more real. If one did not feel it
before, it is now planted in his mind to his serious
detriment, and once there, it begins to breed as disease
germs are said to breed, by millions, and one moment
of worry weds another moment, and the next moment
a family of worries is born that surround, hamper
and bewilder. Is this kindly, is it helpful,
is it loving, is it unselfish?

The questions answer themselves. The planting
of worry in the mind of another is heartless, cruel,
unkind and selfish.

Another question naturally arises: If this course
of action is selfish, and the worrier really desires
to be unselfish, how can he control his worry, at
least so as not to communicate it to another?
The answer also is clear.

Let him put a guard upon his lips, a watch upon his
actions. Let him say to himself: Though
I do not, for my own sake, care to control the needless
worries of my life, I must not, I dare not curse other
lives with them. Hence I must at least keep them
to myself—­I must not voice them, I must
not display them in face, eyes or tone.

Page 28

Then there is the mother who worries over her child’s
clothing. She is never ceasing in her cautions.
It is “don’t, don’t, don’t,”
from morning to night, and whether this seems “nagging”
to her or not, there would be a unanimous vote on
the subject were the child consulted as to his feelings.
Of course the boy, the girl, must be taught to take
care of his, her, clothes, but this is never done by
nagging. A far better plan would be to fit a punishment
which really belongs to the evil or careless habit
of the child. For instance, if a boy will persist
in throwing his hat anywhere, instead of hanging it
up, let the parent give him one caution, not
in a threatening or angry way, but in just as matter
of fact a fashion as if she were telling him of some
news: “John, the next time you fail to hang
your hat in its proper place I shall lock it up for
three days!”

Then, if John fails, take the hat and lock it up,
and let it stay locked-up, though the heavens
fall. The same with a child’s playthings,
tennis racquets, base-balls, bats, etc. As
a rule one application of the rule cures. This
is immeasurably more sensible than nagging, for it
produces the required result almost instantly, and
there is little irritation to either person concerned,
while nagging is never effective, and irritates both
all the time.

Other parents worry considerably over their children
getting in the dirt.

In an article which recently appeared in Good Housekeeping
Dr. Woods Hutchinson says some sensible things on
“Children as Cabbages.” He starts
out by saying: “It is well to remember that
not all dirt is dirty. While some kinds of dirt
are exceedingly dangerous, others are absolutely necessary
to life.”

If your children get into the dirty and dangerous
dirt, spend your energies in getting them into the
other kind of dirt, rather than in nagging. Fall
into the habit of doing the wise, the rational, the
sane thing, because it produces results, rather than
the foolish, irrational, insane thing which never
produces a result save anger, irritation, and oftentimes,
alienation.

In a little book written by J.J. Bell, entitled
Wee MacGregor, there is a worrying mother.
Fortunately she is sweet-spirited with it all, or
it would have been unbearable.

She and her husband John, and the baby, wee Jeannie,
with Macgregor were going out to dinner at “Aunt
Purdie’s,” who was “rale genteel
an’ awfu’ easy offendit.” The
anxious mother was counselling her young son regarding
his behavior at the table of that excellent lady:

Who has not thus seen the anxious mother? And
who ever saw her worrying and anxiety do much if any
good? Train your child by all means in your own
home, but let up when you are going out, for your
worry worries him, makes him self-conscious, brings
about the very disasters you wish to avoid, and at
the same time destroys his, your, and everyone’s
else, pleasure who observes, feels, or hears the expressions
of worry.

CHAPTER VII

CAUSES OF WORRY

Worry is as multiform and as diverse as are the people
who worry. Indeed worriers are the most ingenious
persons in the world. When every possible source
of worry seems to be removed, they proceed immediately
to invent some new cause which an ordinary healthful
mind could never have conceived.

The causes of worry are innumerable. They represent
the sum total of the errors, faults, missteps, unholy
aims, ambitions, foibles, weaknesses and crimes of
men. Every error, mistake, weakness, crime, etc.,
is a source of worry—­a cause of worry.
Worry is connected only with the weak, the human,
the evil side of human nature. It has no place
whatever in association with goodness, purity, holiness,
faith, courage and trust in God. When good men
and women worry, in so far as they worry they are
not good. Their worry is a sign of weakness, of
lack of trust in God, of unbelief, of unfaithfulness.
The man who knows God and his relationship to man;
who knows his own spiritual nature and his relationship
to God never worries. There is no possible
place in such a man’s life for worry.

Hence it will be seen that I believe worry to be evil,
and nothing but evil, and, therefore, without one
reclaiming or redeeming feature, for it can be productive
of nothing but evil.

If you really desire to know the sources of your worry
study each worry as it comes up. Analyse
it, dissect it, weigh it, examine it from every standpoint,
judge it by the one test that everything in life must,
and ought to submit to, viz.: its usefulness.
What use is it to you? How necessary to your
existence? How helpful is it in solving the problems
that confront you; how far does it aid you in their
solution, wherein does it remove the obstacles before
your pathway. Find out how much it strengthens,
invigorates, inspires you. Ask yourself how much
it encourages, enheartens, emboldens you. Put
down on paper every slightest item of good, or help,
or inspiration it is to you, and on the other hand,
the harm, the discouragement, the evil, the fears
it brings to you, and then strike a balance.

Page 30

I can tell you beforehand that after ten years’
study—­if so long were necessary—­you
will fail to find one good thing in favor of worry,
and that every item you will enumerate will be against
it. Hence, why worry? Quit it!

Worry, like all evils, feeds on itself, and grows
greater by its own exercise. Did it decline when
exercised, diminish when allowed a free course, one
might let it alone, even encourage it, in order that
it might the sooner be dead. But, unfortunately,
it works the other way. The more one worries
the more he continues to worry. The more he yields
to it the greater becomes its power. It is a species
of hypnotism: once allow it to control, each
new exercise diminishes the victim’s power of
resistance.

Never was monster more cruel, more relentless, more
certain to hang on to the bitter end than worry.
He shows no mercy, has not the slightest spark of
relenting or yielding. And his power is all the
greater because it is so subtle. He wants you
to be “careful”—­taking good
care, however, not to let you know that he means to
make you full of care. He pleads “love”
as the cause for his existence. He would have
you love your child, hence “worry” about
him. He thus trades on your affection to blind
you to your child’s best interests by “worrying”
about him. For when worry besets you, is harassing
you on every hand, how can you possibly devote your
wisdom, your highest intelligence to safeguarding
the welfare of the one you love.

Never was a slave in the South, though in the hands
of a Legree, more to be pitied than the slave of worry.
He dogs every footstep, is vigilant every moment.
He never sleeps, never tires, never relaxes, never
releases his hold so long as it is possible for him
to retain it. When you seek to awaken people
to the terror, the danger, the hourly harm their slavery
to worry is bringing to them, they are so completely
in worry’s power that they weakly respond:
“But I can’t help it.” And
they verily believe they can’t; that their bondage
is a natural thing; a state “ordained from the
foundation of the world,” altogether ignoring
the frightful reflection such a belief is upon the
goodness of God and his fatherly care for his children.
Natural! It is the most unnatural thing in existence.
Do the birds worry? The beasts of the field?
The clouds? The winds? The sun, moon, stars,
and comets? The trees? The flowers?
The rain-drops? How Bryant rebukes the worrier
in his wonderful poem “To a Water Fowl,”
and Celia Thaxter in her “Sandpiper.”
The former sings of the fowl winging its solitary way
where “rocking billows rise and sink on the chafed
ocean-side,” yet though “lone wandering”
it is not lost. And from its protection he deduces
the lesson:

He who, from zone
to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain
flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone
Will lead my steps
aright.

Page 31

And so Celia Thaxter sang of the sandpiper:

He has no thought of any wrong,
He scans me with a fearless eye.

And her faith expressed itself in a later verse:

I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through
the sky:
For are we not God’s children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and
I?

There is no worry in Nature. It is man alone
that worries. Nature goes on her appointed way
each day unperturbed, unvexed, care-free, doing her
allotted tasks and resting absolutely in the almighty
sustaining power behind her. Should man do any
less? Should man—­the reasoning creature,
with intelligence to see, weigh, judge, appreciate,—­alone
be uncertain of the fatherly goodness of God; alone
be unable to discern the wisdom and love behind all
things? Worry, therefore, is an evidence that
we do not trust the all-fatherliness of God.

It is also the direct product of vanity, pride and
self-conceit. If these three qualities of evil
in the human heart could be removed a vast aggregate
amount of worry would die instantly. No one can
study his fellow creatures and not soon learn that
an immense amount of worry is caused by these three
evils.

We are worried lest our claims to attention are not
fully recognized, less our worth be not observed,
our proper station accorded to us. How we press
our paltry little claims upon others, how we glorify
our own insignificant deeds; how large loom up our
small and puny acts. The whole universe centers
in us; our ego is a most important thing; our work
of the highest value and significance; our worth most
inestimable.

The fact of the matter is most men and women are inestimable,
their deeds of value, their lives of importance.
Our particular circle needs us, as we need those who
compose it, we are all important, but few, indeed,
are there, whose power, influence and importance reach
far. Most of the men and women of the world are
ordinary. A man may be a king in Wall street,
and yet influence but few outside of his own immediate
sphere. Most probably he is unknown to the great
mass of mankind. Adventitious circumstances bring
some men and women more prominently before the world
than others, but even such fame as this is transient,
evanescent, and of little importance. The devoted
love of our own small circle; the reliable friendship
of the few; the blind adoration of the pet dog are
worth more than all the “fame,” the “eclat,”
the “renown” of the multitude. And
where we have such love, friendship, and blind adoration,
let us rest content therein, and smile at the floods
of temporary and evanescent emotion which sweep over
the mob, but do not have us for their object.
I have just read a letter which perfectly illustrates
how our vanity, our pride, and personal importance
bring much worry to us. The writer—­practically
a stranger coming from a far-away state—­evidently
expected to be received with a cordial welcome and

Page 32

open arms, by one who scarcely knew him, given an
important place in a lengthy program where men of
national reputation were to speak, and generally be
treated with deference and respect. Unfortunately
his name was not placed in full on the program,—­curtly
initialed he called it—­and owing to its
length “the chairman caused me to spoil my remarks
by asking me to shorten them,” and a hotel clerk
“outrageously insulted” him when he asked
for information. Then, to make ill matters worse—­piling
Ossa. upon Pelion—­he was asked to speak
at a certain club, with others. One of the newspapers,
in reporting the event, commented upon what the others
said and did but ignore him. This he thought might
have been merely an oversight, but when, the next
day, he saw another report wherein he was not mentioned
he was certain “it was a deliberate intention
to ignore” him. He then asks that the person
to whom he writes “try to find out who is responsible
for this affront,” and tell him—­in
order that he may worry some more, I suppose, over
trying to “get back at him.”

Poor, poor fellow, how he is to be pitied for being
so “sensitive,” so sure that people regard
him enough to want to affront him.

Here is a perfect illustration of the worries caused
by vanity; five complaints in one letter, of indignities,
or affronts, that an ordinary, robust red-blooded
man would have passed by without notice. If I
were to worry over the times I have been ignored and
neglected I should worry every day. I am fairly
well known to many hundreds of thousands of people
who read my books, my magazine articles, and hear
my lectures, yet I often go to cities and there are
no brass bands, no committee, flowers, or banquet
to welcome me. No! indeed, the indignity is thrust
upon me of having to walk to the hotel, carry my own
grip, and register, the same as any other ordinary,
common, everyday man! Why should not my blood
boil when I think of it? Then, too, when I recall
how often my addresses are ignored in the local press,
ought not I to be aroused to fierce ire? When
a hotel clerk fails to recognize my national importance
and gives me a flippant answer when I ask for information
should I not deem it time that the Secretary of State
interfere and write a State paper upon the matter?

Oh vanity, conceit, pride, how many sleepless hours
of worry and fret you bring to your victims, and the
pitiable, the lamentable thing about it all is that
they congratulate themselves upon being filled with
“laudable pride,” “recognizing their
own importance,” and knowing that “honorable
ambition” is beneficial. Nothing that causes
unnecessary heart-aches and worry is worth while, and
of all the prolific causes of these woes commend me
to the vanity, the conceit, the pride of small minds
and petty natures.

Page 33

False pride leads its victim to want to make a false
impression. He puts on a false appearance.
He wishes to appear wiser, better, in easier circumstances,
richer than he is. He wears a false front.
He is unnatural. He dare not—­having
decided to make the appearance, and win the impression
of falseness—­be natural. Hence he is
self-conscious all the time lest he make a slip, contradict
himself, lose the result he is seeking to attain.
He is to be compared to an actor whose part requires
him to wear a wig, a false moustache, a false chin.
In the hurry of preparation these shams are not adjusted
properly and the actor rushes on the stage fearful
every moment lest his wig is awry, his moustache fall
off, or the chin slip aside and make him ridiculous.
He dare not stop to make sure, to “fix”
them if they are wrong, as that would reveal their
falsity immediately. He can only play on, sweating
blood the while.

In the case of the actor one can laugh at the temporary
fear and worry, but what a truly pitiable object is
the man, the woman, whose whole life is one dread
worry lest his, her, false appearance be discovered.
And while pride and vanity are not the only sources
of these attempts to make false impressions upon others
they are a most prolific source. In another chapter
I have treated more fully of this phase of the subject.

Wastefulness, extravagance, is a prolific source of
worry. Spend to-day, starve to-morrow. Throw
your money to the birds to-day; to-morrow the crow,
jay, and vulture will laugh and mock at you. Feast
to-day; next week you may starve. Riches take
to themselves wings and fly away. No one is absolutely
safe, and while many thousands go through life indifferent
about their expenditures, wasteful and extravagant
and do not seem to be brought to time therefor, it
must not be forgotten that tens of thousands start
out to do the same thing and fail. What is the
result? Worry over the folly of the attempt;
worry as to where the necessary things for the future
are coming from!

While I would not have the well-to-do feel that they
must be niggardly I would earnestly warn them against
extravagance, against the acquiring of expensive habits
of wastefulness that later on may be chains of a cruel
bondage. Why forge fetters upon oneself?
Far better be free now and thus cultivate freedom
for whatever future may come. For as sure as
sure can be wilful waste and reckless extravagance
now will sometime or other produce worry.

One great, deep, awful source of worry is our failure
to accept the inevitable. Something happens,—­we
wilfully shut our eyes to the fact that this something
has changed forever the current of our lives,
and if the new current seems evil, if it brings
discomfort, separation, change of circumstance, etc.,
we worry, and worry, and continue to worry. This
is lamentably foolish, utterly absurd and altogether
reprehensible. Let us resolutely face the facts,
accept them, and then reshape our lives, bravely and
valiantly, to suit the new conditions.

Page 34

For instance a friend of mine spent twenty years in
the employ of a great corporation. As a reward
of faithful service he was finally put in a responsible
position as the head of a department. A few months
ago he was sent East on a special mission connected
with his work. Just before his return the corporation
elected a new president, who “shook up”
the whole concern, changed around several officials,
dismissed others, and in the case of my friend, supplanted
him by a new man imported from the East, offering
him a subordinate position, but, at the same salary
he had before been receiving.

How should this man have treated this settled fixed
fact in his life? He had two great broad pathways
open to him. In one he would deliberately recognize
and accept the changed condition, acquiese in it and
live accordingly. It is not pleasant to be supplanted,
but if another man is appointed to do the work you
have been doing, and your superiors think he can do
it better than you have been doing it, then manfully
face the facts and accord him the most sincere and
hearty support. It may be hard, but our training
and discipline,—­which means our improvement
and advancement—­come, not from doing the
easy and pleasant things, but from striving, cheerfully
and pleasantly to do the arduous and disagreeable
ones. The other way open for my friend was to
resent the change, accept it with anger, let his vanity
be wounded, and begin to worry over it. What
would have been the probable result? The moment
he began to worry his efficiency would have decreased,
and he would thus have prepared himself for another
“blow” from his employers, another change
less to his advantage, and with a possible reduction
in salary. His employers, too, would have pointed
to his decreased efficiency—­the only thing
they consider—­as justification for their
act.

I would not say that if a man, in such a case as I
have described, deems that he has been treated unjustly,
should not protest, but, when he has protested, and
a decision has been rendered against him let him accept
the judgment with serenity, refuse to worry over it,
and go to work with loyalty and faithfulness, or else
seek new employment.

Even, on the other hand, were he to have been discharged,
there could have come no good from yielding to worry.
Accept the inevitable, do not argue or fret
about it, put worry aside, go to work to find a new
position, and make what seemed to be an evil the stepping-stone
to something better.

Mrs. Jessie Benton Fremont, the wife of the gallant
pathfinder, General Fremont, was afflicted with deafness
in the later years of her life. She,—­the
petted and flattered, the caressed and spoiled child
of fortune, the honored and respected woman of power
and superior ability—­deaf, and unable to
participate in the conversation going on around her.
Many a woman under these conditions, would have become
irritable, irascible, and a reviler of Fate. To

Page 35

any woman it would have been a great deprivation,
but to one mentally endowed as Mrs. Fremont, it was
especially severe. Yet did she “worry”
about it? No! bravely, cheerfully, boldly, she
accepted the inevitable, and in effect defied
the deafness that had come to her to destroy her happiness,
embitter her life, take away the serenity of her mind
and the equipoise of her soul. If there had to
be a battle to gain this high plane of acceptance,
she fought it out in secret, for her friends and the
world never heard a word of a murmur from her.
I had the joy of a talk with her about it, for it
was a joy to have her make light of her affliction,
in the great number of good things wherein God had
blessed her. Laughingly she said: “Even
in deafness I find many compensations. One is
never bored by conversation that is neither intelligent,
instructive or interesting. I can go to sleep
under the most persistent flood of boredom, and like
the proverbial water on a duck’s back it never
bothers me. Again, I never hear the unpleasant
things said about either my friends or my enemies,
and what a blessing that is. I am also spared
hearing about many of the evils, the disagreeable,
the unpleasant and horrible things of life that I cannot
change, help, or alleviate, and I am thankful for my
ignorance. Then, again, when people say things
that I can and do hear—­in my trumpet—­that
I don’t think anyone should ever say, I can rebuke
them by making them think that I heard them say the
very opposite of what they did say, and I smile upon
them ‘and am a villain still.’”

Charles F. Lummis, the well-known litterateur and
organizer of the South-West Museum, of Los Angeles,
after using his eyes and brain more liberally than
most men do in a lifetime thrice, or four times as
long as his, was unfortunately struck blind.
Did he “worry” over it, and fret himself
into a worse condition? No! not for a moment.
Cheerfully he accepted the inevitable, got someone
to read and write for him, to guide him through the
streets, and went ahead with his work just as if nothing
had happened, looking forward to the time when his
eyesight would be restored to him and hopefully and
intelligently worked to that end. In a year or
so he and his friends were made happy by that coming
to pass, but even had it not been so, I am assured
Dr. Lummis would have faced the inevitable without
a whimper, a cry, or a word of worry or complaint.

Those who yield to worry over small physical ills
should read his inspiring My Friend Will,[A]
a personal record of his sucessful struggle against
two severe and prostrating attacks of paralysis.
One perusal will show them the folly and futility
of worry; a second will shame them because they have
so little self-control as to spend their time, strength,
and energy in worry; and a third perusal will lead
them to drive every fragment of worry out of the hidden
recesses of their minds and set them upon a better
way—­a way of serenity, equipoise, and healthful,
strenuous, yet joyous and radiant living.

Page 36

Recently I had a conversation with the former superintendent
of a poor farm, which bears upon this subject in a
practical way. In relating some of his experiences
he told of a “rough-neck”—­a
term implying an ignorant man of rude, turbulent,
quarrelsome disposition—­who had threatened
to kill the foreman of the farm. Owing to their
irreconcilable differences the rough inmate decided
to leave and so informed the superintendent, thus
practically dismissing himself from the institution.
A year later he returned and asked to be re-admitted.
After a survey of the whole situation the superintendent
decided that it was not wise to re-admit him, and
that he would better secure a situation for him outside.
He offered to do so and the man left apparently satisfied.
Three days later he reappeared, entered the office
with a loaded and cocked revolver held behind his back,
and abruptly announced: “I’ve come
to blow out your brains.” Before he could
shoot the superintendent was upon him and a fierce
struggle ensued for the possession of the weapon.
The superintendent at last took it away, secured help
and handcuffed the would-be murderer. Realizing
that his act was the result of at least partial insanity,
the was-to-be victim did not press the charge of murderous
assault but allowed—­indeed urged that he
be sent to the insane asylum where he now is.

Now this is the point I wish to make. It is perfectly
within the bounds of possibility that this man will
some day be regarded as safely sane. Yet it is
well known by the awful experiences of many such cases
that it is both possible and probable that during the
months or years of his incarceration he will continue
to harbor, even to feed and foster the bitter feeling,
the hatred, perhaps, that led him to attempt the murder
of the superintendent, and that on his release he
will again attempt to carry out his nefarious and awful
design.

What, then, should be the mental attitude of the superintendent
and his family? Ought they not to be worried?
I got the answer for my readers from this man, and
it is so perfectly in accord with my own principles
that I find great pleasure in recording it. Said
he:

Don’t think for one moment that
I minimize the possible danger. The asylum
physician who was familiar with the whole circumstances
warned me not to rest in fancied security. I
have notified the proper officials that the man
who attempted to murder me is not to be released
either as cured or on parole without giving me
sufficient notice. I do not wish that he
should be kept in the asylum a single day longer than
is fully necessary, but before I allow him to
be released I must be thoroughly satisfied that
he has no murderous designs on me, and that he
is truly and satisfactorily repentant for the
attack he made when, ostensibly, he was mentally irresponsible.
I shall require that he be put on record as fully

Page 37

understanding and appreciating his own personal responsibility
for my safety—­so that should he still hold
any wrongful designs, and afterwards succeed in
carrying them out, he or his attorneys will be
debarred from again pleading insanity or mental
incompetency.

Hence while I fully realize the possibility
of danger I do not have a moment’s worry
about it. I have done and shall do all I can,
satisfactorily, to protect myself, without any feeling
of harshness or desire to injure the poor fellow,
and there I let the matter rest to take care of
itself.

This is practical wisdom. This is sane philosophy.
Not ignoring the danger, pooh-pooing it, scoffing
at it and refusing to recognize it, but calmly, sanely,
with a kindly heart looking at possible contingencies,
preparing for them, and then serenely trusting to the
spiritual forces of life to control events to a wise
and satisfactory issue.

Can you suggest anything better? Is not such
a course immeasurably better than to allow himself
to worry, and fret and fear all the time? Practical
precaution, taken without enmity—­note
these italicized words—­trustful serenity,
faithful performance of present duty unhampered by
fears and worries—­this is the rational,
normal, philosophic, sane course to follow.

Another great source of worry is our failure to
distinguish essentials from non-essentials.
What are the essentials for life? For a man,
honesty, truth, earnestness, strength, health, ability
to work, and work to do. He may or may not be
handsome; he may or may not have wealth, position,
fame, education; but to be a man among men, these
other things he must have. For a woman,—­health,
love, work, and such virtues as both men and women
need. She might enjoy friends, but they are not
essential as health or work; she would be a strange
woman if she did not prize beauty, but devoted love
is worth far more than beauty or all the conquests
it brings. What is the essential for a chair?—­its
capacity to be used to sit upon with comfort.
A house?—­that it is adapted to the making
of a home. You don’t buy a printing-press
to curl your hair with but to print, and in accordance
with its printing power is it judged. A boat’s
usefulness is determined by its worthiness in the
water, to carry safely, rapidly, largely as is demanded
of it.

This is the judgement sanity demands of everything.
What is essential—­What not? Is it
essential to be a society leader, to belong to every
club, to hold office, to give as many dinners as one’s
neighbors, to have a bigger house, furniture with brighter
polish, bigger carvings and more ugly designs than
anyone else in town, to have our names in the papers
oftener than others, to have more servants, a newer
style automobile, put on more show, pomp, ceremony
and circumstance than our friends?

By no means! Oh for men and women who have the
discerning power—­the sight for the essential
things, the determination to have them and let non-essentials
go. They are the wise ones, the happy ones, the
free-from-worry ones.

Page 38

Later I shall refer extensively to Mrs. Canfield’s
book The Squirrel Cage. She has many wise
utterances on this phase of the worry question.
For instance, in referring to the mad race for wealth
and position that keeps a man away from home so many
hours of the day that his wife and child scarce know
him she introduces the following dialogue:

One of them whose house isn’t
far from mine, told me that he
hadn’t seen his children,
except asleep, for three weeks.

‘But something ought
to be done about it!’ The girl’s
deep-lying instinct for instant
reparation rose up hotly.

‘Are they so much worse off than
most American business men?’ queried Rankin.
’Do any of them feel they can take the time
to see much more than the outside of their children;
and isn’t seeing them asleep about as—­’

Lydia cut him short quickly. ’You’re
always blaming them for that,’ she cried.
’You ought to pity them. They can’t
help it. It’s better for the children
to have bread and butter, isn’t it—­’

Rankin shook his head. ’I
can’t be fooled with that sort of talk—­I’ve
lived with too many kinds of people. At least
half the time it is not a question of bread and
butter. It’s a question of giving the
children bread and butter and sugar rather than
bread and butter and father. Of course, I’m
a fanatic on the subject. I’d rather
leave off even the butter than the father—­let
alone the sugar.’

Later on Lydia herself lost her father
and after his death her own wail was: ’I
never lived with my father. He was always away
in the morning before I was up. I was away, or
busy, in the evening when he was there. On
Sundays he never went to church as mother and
I did—­I suppose now because he had some
other religion of his own. But if he had I
never knew what it was—­or anything
else that was in his mind or heart. It never
occurred to me that I could. He tried to love
me—­I remember so many times now—­and
that makes me cry!—­how he tried
to love me! He was so glad to see me when
I got home from Europe—­but he never
knew anything that happened to me. I told
you once before that when I had pneumonia and nearly
died mother kept it from him because he was on
a big case. It was all like that—­always.
He never knew.’

Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain,
his face horrified: ’Lydia, I cannot
let you go on! you are unfair—­you shock
me. You are morbid! I knew your father
intimately. He loved you beyond expression.
He would have done anything for you. But his
profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in
his place a little. It is all or nothing
in the law—­as in business.’

But Lydia replied: ’When
you bring children Into the world, you expect
to have them cost you some money, don’t you?
You know you mustn’t let them die of starvation.
Why oughtn’t you to expect to have them

Page 39

cost you thought, and some sharing of your life
with them, and some time—­real time, not
just scraps that you can’t use for business?’

She made the same appeal once to her
husband in regard to their own lives. She
wanted to see and know more of him, his business,
his inner life, and this was her cry: ’Paul,
I’m sure there’s something the matter
with the way we live—­I don’t
like it! I don’t see that it helps us a
bit—­or anyone else—­you’re
just killing yourself to make money that goes to
get things we don’t need nearly as much as we
need more of each other! We’re not
getting a bit nearer to each other—­actually
further away, for we’re both getting different
from what we were without the other’s knowing
how! And we’re not getting nicer—­and
what’s the use of living if we don’t do
that? We’re just getting more and more
set on scrambling ahead of other people.
And we’re not even having a good time out of
it! And here is Ariadne—­and another
one coming—­and we’ve nothing
to give them but just this—­this—­this—­

Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated
and uneasy, as he always was at any attempt to
examine too closely the foundations of existing
ideas. ’Why, Lydia, what’s the matter
with you? You sound as though you’d
been reading some fool socialist literature or
something.’

You know I don’t read anything,
Paul. I never hear about anything but novels.
I never have time for anything else, and very
likely I couldn’t understand it if I read it,
not having any education. That’s one
thing I want you to help me with. All I want
is a chance for us to live together a little more,
to have a few more thoughts in common, and oh!
to be trying to be making something better out
of ourselves for our children’s sake.
I can’t see that we’re learning to be anything
but—­you, to be an efficient machine
for making money, I to think of how to entertain
as though we had more money than we really have.
I don’t seem really to know you or live with
you any more than if we were two guests stopping
at the same hotel. If socialists are trying
to fix things better, why shouldn’t we have
time—­both of us—­to read their
books; and you could help me know what they mean?’

Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful
laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia’s
pale face like a blow. ’I gather, then,
Lydia, that what you’re asking me to do is to
neglect my business in order to read socialistic
literature with you?’

His wife’s rare resentment rose.
She spoke with dignity: ’I begged you
to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what
I mean, although I’m so fumbling, and say
it so badly. As for its being impossible
to change things, I’ve heard you say a great
many times that there are no conditions that can’t
be changed if people would really try—­’

‘Good heavens!
I said that of business conditions!’ shouted
Paul, outraged at being so
misquoted.

Page 40

’Well, if it’s true of them—­No;
I feel that things are the way they are because
we don’t really care enough to have them some
other way. If you really cared as much about sharing
a part of your life with me—­really
sharing—­as you do about getting the
Washburn contract—­’

Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely
unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked
protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his
accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved.
’Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to
your nervous condition, and so I can’t blame
you for it. But I can’t help pointing
out to you that it is entirely uncalled for.
There are few women who have a husband as absolutely
devoted as yours. You grumble about my not
sharing my life with you—­why, I give
it to you entire!’ His astonished bitterness
grew as he voiced it. ’What am I working
so hard for if not to provide for you and our
child—­our children! Good Heavens!
What more can I do for you than to keep my
nose on the grindstone every minute. There
are limits to even a husband’s time and
endurance and capacity for work.’

Hence it will be seen that I would have one Quit Worrying
about the non-essentials of life, and this is best
done by giving full heed to the essentials and letting
the others go. Naturally, if one wilfully and
purposefully determines to follow non-essentials, he
may as well recognize the fact soon as late that he
has deliberately chosen a course that cannot fail
to produce its own many and irritating worries.

Another serious cause of worry is bashfulness.
One who is bashful finds in his intercourse with his
fellows many worries. His hands and feet are
too large, he blushes at a word, he doesn’t know
what to say or how, he is confused if attention is
directed his way, his thoughts fly to the ends of
the earth the moment he is addressed, and if he is
expected to say anything, his worries increase so that
his pain and distress are manifest to all. To
such an one I would say: Assert your manhood,
your womanhood. Brace up. Face the music.
Remember these facts. You are dealing with men
and women, youths and maidens, of the same flesh and
blood, mentality as yourself. You average up with
the rest of them. Why should you be afraid?
Call upon your reasoning power. Assert the dignity
of your own existence. You are here by the will
of God as much as they. There is a purpose in
your creation as much as in theirs. You have
a right to be seen and heard as well as have they.
Your life may be charged with importance to mankind
far more than theirs. Anyhow for what it is,
large or small, you are going to use it to the full,
and you do not propose to be laughed out of it, sneered
out of it, either by the endeavors of others or by
your own fears of others. Then, when you have
once fully reasoned the thing out, do not hesitate
to plunge into the fullest possible association with
your fellows. Brave them, defy them (in your own
heart), resolutely face them, and my word and assurance
for it, they will lose their terror, and you will
lose your bashfulness with a speed that will astonish
you.

Page 41

Closely allied to bashfulness as a cause of many worries
is hyper-or super-sensitiveness. And yet it
is an entirely different mental attitude. Hyper-sensitiveness
may cause bashfulness, but there are many thousands
of hyper-sensitives who have not a spark of bashfulness
in their condition. They are full of vanity or
self-conceit. Elsewhere I have referred to one
of these. Or they are hyper-sensitive in regard
to their health. They mustn’t do this, or
that, or the other, they must be careful not to sit
near a window, allow a door to be open, or go into
an unwarmed room. Their feet must never be wet,
or their clothing, and as for sleeping in a cold room,
or getting up before the fire is lighted, they could
not live through such awful hardships.

I have no desire to excoriate or make fun of those
who really suffer from chronic invalidism, yet I am
fully assured that much of the hyper-sensitiveness
of the neurasthenic and hypochondriac could be removed
by a little rude, rough and tumble contact with life.
It would do most of these people no harm to follow
the advice given by Abernethy, the great English physician,
to a pampered, overfed hyper-sensitive: Live
on six pence a day and earn it. I have
found few hyper-sensitives among the poor. Poverty
is a fine cure for most cases, though there are those
who cling to their pride of birth of education, or
God knows what of insane belief in their superiority
over ordinary mortals, and make that the occasion,
or cause, of the innumerable and fretting worries
of hyper-sensitiveness.

Another serious cause of worry, in this busy, bustling,
rapid age, is the need we feel for hurry. We
are caught in the mad rush and its influence leads
us to feel that we, too, must rush. There is no
earthly reason for our hurry, and yet we cannot seem
to help it.

Hurry means worry. Rush spells fret. Haste
makes waste. You live in the country and are
a commuter. You must be in the city on the stroke
of nine. To do this, you must catch the 8:07.
You have your breakfast to get and it takes six minutes
to walk to the station. No one can do it comfortably
in less. Yet every morning, ever since you took
this country cottage, you have had to rush through
your breakfast, and rush to the depot in order to
catch the train. Thus starting the day on the
rush, you have continued “on the stretch”
all day, and get back home at night tired out, fretted
and worried “almost to death.” Even
when you sit down to breakfast, you begin to worry
if wifie doesn’t have everything ready.
You know you’ll be late. You feel it, and
if the toast and coffee are not on the table the moment
you sit down, your querelous complaints strike the
morning air.

Now what’s the use?

Why don’t you get up ten, fifteen, or twenty
minutes earlier, and thus give yourself time to eat
comfortably, and thus get over the worry of your rush?
Set the alarm clock for 7:00, or 6:45, or even 6:30.
Far better get up half an hour too early, than worry
yourself, your wife, and the whole household by your
insane hurry. Your worry is wholly unnecessary
and shows a fearful lack of simple intelligence.

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Annie Laurie, who writes many sage counsels in the
San Francisco Examiner, had an excellent article
on this subject in the issue of December 31, 1915.
She wrote:

Here is something that I saw out my window—­it
has given me the big thought for my biggest New Year’s
resolution. The man at the corner house ran down
the steps in a terrible hurry. He saw the car
coming up the hill and whistled to it from the porch,
but the man who was running the car did not hear the
whistle. Anyway, he didn’t stop the car,
and the man on the steps looked as if he’d like
to catch the conductor of that car and do something
distinctly unfriendly to him, and do it right then
and there. He jammed his hat down over his forehead
and started walking very fast.

“What’s your hurry?” said the man
he was passing on the corner. “What’s
your hurry, Joe?” and the man on the corner held
out his hand.

“Well, I’ll be—­,” said
Joe, and he held out his hand, too, “if it isn’t—­”

And it was, and they both laughed and shook hands
and clapped each other on the back and shook hands
again.

“What’s your hurry?” said the man
on the corner again.

“I dun-no,” said the man who was so cross
because he’d lost his car. “Nothing
much, I guess,” and he laughed and the other
man laughed and they shook hands again. And the
last I saw of them they had started down the street
right In the opposite direction from which the man
in the hurry had started to go, and they weren’t
in a hurry at all.

Do you know what I wished right then and there?
I wished that every time I get into the senseless
habit of rushing everywhere and tearing through everything
as if it was my last day on earth and there wasn’t
a minute left to lose, somebody would stop me on the
corner of whatever street of circumstance I may be
starting to cross and say to me in friendly fashion:

“What’s the hurry?”

What is the hurry, after all? Where are we all
going? What for?

What difference does it make whether I read my paper
at 8 o’clock in the morning or at half-past
9?

Will the world stop swinging in its orbit if I don’t
meet just so many people a day, write so many letters,
hear so many lectures, skim through so many books?
Of course if I’m earning my living I must work
for it and work not only honestly but hard. But
it seems to me that most of the terrific hurrying
we do hasn’t much to do with really essential
work after all. It’s a kind of habit we
get into, a sort of madness, like the thing that overtakes
the crowd at a ferry landing or the entrance to a
train. I’ve seen men, and women, too, fairly
fight to get onto a particular car when the next car
would have done just exactly as well.

Where are they going in such a hurry? To save
a life? To mend a broken heart? To help
to heal a wounded spirit? Or are they just rushing
because the rest do it?

What do they get out of life—­these people
who are always in a rush?

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Look! The laurel tree in my California garden
is full of bursting buds! The rains are beginning
and the trees will soon be flecked with a silver veil
of blossoms. I hadn’t noticed it before.
I’ve been too busy.

What’s your hurry? Come, friend of my heart,
I’ll say that to you to-day and say it in deep
and friendly earnest.

What’s your hurry?
Come, let’s go for a walk together and see
if we can find out. Let
us keep finding out through all the
new year.

There are many other causes of worry, some of them
so insidious, so powerful, as to call for treatment
in special chapters.

CHAPTER VIII

PROTEAN FORMS OF WORRY

In a preceding chapter, I have shown that worry is
a product of our modern civilization, and that it
belongs only to the Occidental world. It is a
modern disease, prevalent only among the so-called
civilized peoples. There is no doubt that in
many respects we are what we call ourselves—­the
most highly civilized people in the world. But
do we not pay too high a price for much of our civilization?
If it is such that it fails to enable us to conserve
our health, our powers of enjoyment, our spontaneity,
our mental vigor, our spirituality, and the exuberant
radiance of our life—­bodily, mental, spiritual—­I
feel that we need to examine it carefully and find
out wherein lies its inadequacy or its insufficiency.

While our civilization has reached some very elevated
points, and some men have made wonderful advancement
in varied fields, it cannot be denied that the mass
of men and women are still groping along in the darkness
of mental mediocrity, and on the mud-flats of the
commonplace. Ten thousand men and women can now
read where ten alone read a few centuries ago.
But what are the ten thousand reading? That which
will elevate, improve, benefit? See the piles
of sensational yellow novels, magazines, and newspapers
that deluge us day by day, week by week, month by
month, for the answer. True, there are many who
desire the better forms of literature, and for these
we give thanks; they are of the salt that saves our
civilization.

I do not wish to seem, even, to be cynical or pessimistic,
but when I look at some of the mental pabulum that
our newspapers supply, I cannot but feel that we are
making vast efforts to maintain the commonplace and
dignify the trivial.

For instance: Look at the large place the Beauty
Department of a newspaper occupies in the thoughts
of thousands of women and girls. Instead of seeking
to know what they should do to keep their bodies and
minds healthful and vigorous, they are deeply concerned
over their physical appearance. They write and
ask questions that show how worried they are about
their skin—­freckles, pimples, discolorations,
patches, etc.—­their complexion, their
hair, its color, glossiness, quantity, how it should

Page 44

be dressed, and a thousand and one things that clearly
reveal the improper emphasis placed upon them.
I do not wish to ignore the basic facts behind these
anxious questionings. It is right and proper
that women (and men also) should give due attention
to their physical appearance. But when it becomes
a mere matter of the outward show of cosmetics,
powders, rouges, washes, pencils, and things that
affect the outside only, then the emphasis is in the
wrong place, and we are worrying about the wrong thing.
Our appearance is mainly the result of our physical
and mental condition. If the body is healthy,
the skin and hair will need no especial attention,
and, indeed, every wise person knows that the application
of many of the cosmetics, etc., commonly used,
is injurious, if not positively dangerous.

Then, too, observation shows that too many women and
girls go beyond reasonable attention to these matters
and begin to worry over them. Once become slaves
to worry, and every hour of the day some new irritant
will arise. Some new “dope” is advertised;
some new fashion devised; some new frivolity developed.
Vanity and worry now begin to vie with each other
as to which shall annoy and vex, sting and irritate
their victim the more. Each is a nightmare of
a different breed, but no sooner does one bound from
the saddle, before the other puts in an appearance
and compels its victim to a performance. Only
a thorough awakening can shake such nightmares off,
and comparatively few have any desire to be awakened.
I have watched such victims and they arouse in me
both laughter and sadness. One is sure her hair
is not the proper color to match her complexion and
eyes. It must be dyed. Then follows the
worries as to what dye she shall use, and methods
of application. Invariably the results produce
worry, for they are never satisfactory, and now she
is worried while dressing, while eating, and when
she goes out into the street, lest people notice that
her hair is improperly dyed. Every stranger that
looks at her adds to the worry, for it confirms her
previous fears that she does not look all right.
If she tries another hair of the dog that has already
bitten her and allows the hair specialist to guide
her again, she goes through more worries of similar
fashion. She must treat her hair in a certain
way to conform to prevailing styles—­and
so she worries hourly over a matter that, at the outside,
should occupy her attention for a few minutes of each
day.

There are men who are equally worried over their appearance.
Their hair is not growing properly, or their ears
are not the proper shape, or their ears are too large,
or their hands are too rough, or their complexion
doesn’t match the ties they like to wear, or
some equally foolish and nonsensical thing. Some
wish to be taller, others not so tall; quite an army
seeks to be thinner and another of equal numbers desires
to be stouter; some wish they were blondes, and others
that they were brunettes. The result is that
drug-stores, beauty-parlors, and complexion specialists
for men and women are kept busy all their time, robbing
poor, hard-working creatures of their earnings because
of insane worries that they are not appearing as well
as they ought to do.

Page 45

Clothing is a perpetual source of worry to thousands.
They must keep up with the styles, the latest fashions,
for to be “out of fashion,” “a back
number,” gives them “a conniption fit.”
An out-of-date hat, or shirt-waist, jacket, coat,
skirt, or shoe humiliates and distresses them more
than would a violation of the moral law—­provided
it were undetected.

To these, my worrying friends, I continually put the
question: Is it worth while? Is the game
worth the shot? What do you gain for all your
worry? Rest and peace of mind? Alas, no!
If the worry and effort accomplished anything, I would
be the last to deprecate it, but observation and experience
have taught me that the more you yield to these
demons of vanity and worry, the more relentlessly they
harry you. They veritably are demons that
seize you by the throat and hang on like grim death
until they suffocate and strangle you.

Do you propose, therefore, any longer to submit?
Are you wilfully and knowingly going to allow yourself
to remain within their grasp? You have a remedy
in your own hands. Kill your foolish vanity by
determining to accept yourself as you are. All
the efforts in the world will not make any changes
worth while. Fix upon the habits of dress, etc.,
that good sense tells you are reasonable and in accord
with your age, your position and your purse, and then
follow them regardless of the fashion or the prevailing
style. You know as well as I that, unless you
are a near-millionaire, you cannot possibly keep up
with the many and various changes demanded by current
fashion. Then why worry yourself by trying?
Why spend your small income upon the unattainable,
or upon that which, even if you could attain it, you
would find unsatisfying and incomplete?

In your case, worry is certainly the result of mental
inoccupancy. This is sometimes called “empty
headedness,” and while the term seems somewhat
harsh and rough, it is pretty near the truth.
If you spent one-tenth the amount of energy seeking
to put something into your head that you spend
worrying as to what you shall put on your head,
and how to fix it up, your life would soon be far more
different than you can now conceive.

Carelessness and laziness are both great causes of
worry. The careless man, the lazy man are each
indifferent as to how their work is done; such men
seldom do well that which they undertake. Everything
carelessly or lazily done is incomplete, inadequate,
incompetent, and, therefore, a source of distress,
discontent, and worry. A careless or lazy plumber
causes much worry, for, even though his victims may
have learned the lesson I am endeavoring to inculcate
throughout these pages, it is a self-evident proposition
that they will not allow his indifferent work to stand
without correction. Therefore, the telephone
bell calls continually, he or his men must go out and
do the work again, and when pay-day comes, he fails
to receive the check good work would surely have made
forthcoming to him.

Page 46

The schoolboy, schoolgirl, has to learn this lesson,
and the sooner the better. The teacher never
nags the careful and earnest student; only the lazy
and careless are worried by extra lessons, extra recitals,
impositions, and the like.

All through life carelessness and laziness bring worry,
and he is a wise person who, as early as he discovers
these vices in himself, seeks to correct or, better
still, eliminate them.

Another form of worry is that wherein the worrier
is sure that no one is to be relied upon to do his
duty. Dickens, in his immortal Pickwick Papers,
gives a forceful example of this type. Mr. Magnus
has just introduced himself to Pickwick, and they find
they are both going to Norwich on the same stage.

‘Now, gen’lm’n,’
said the hostler, ’Coach is ready, if you
please.’

‘Is all my luggage in?’
inquired Magnus.

‘All right, Sir.’

‘Is the red bag in?’

‘All right, Sir.’

‘And the striped bag?’

‘Fore boot, Sir.’

‘And the brown-paper
parcel?’

‘Under the seat, Sir.’

‘And the leathern hat-box?’

‘They’re all in,
Sir.’

‘Now will you get up?’
said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Excuse me,’ replied Magnus,
standing on the wheel. ’Excuse me,
Mr. Pickwick, I cannot consent to get up in this state
of uncertainty. I am quite satisfied from
that man’s manner, that that leather hat-box
is not in.’

The solemn protestations of the hostler
being unavailing, the leather hat-box was obliged
to be raked up from the lowest depth of the boot,
to satisfy him that it had been safely packed;
and after he had been assured on this head, he felt
a solemn presentiment, first, that the red bag
was mislaid, and next, that the striped bag had
been stolen, and then that the brown-paper parcel
had become untied. At length when he had received
ocular demonstration of the groundless nature of each
and every one of these suspicions, he consented
to climb up to the roof of the coach, observing
that now he had taken everything off his mind
he felt quite comfortable and happy.

But this was only a temporary feeling, for as they
journeyed along, every break in the conversation was
filled up by Mr. Magnus’s “loudly expressed
anxiety respecting the safety and well-being of the
two bags, the leather hat-box, and the brown-paper
parcel.”

Of course, this is an exaggerated picture, yet it
properly suggests and illustrates this particular,
senseless form of worry, with which we are all more
or less familiar. In business, such a worrier
is a constant source of irritation to all with whom
he comes in contact, either as inferior or superior.
To his inferiors, his worrying is a bedeviling influence
that irritates and helps produce the very incapacity
for attention to detail that is required; and to superiors,

Page 47

it is a sure sign of incompetency. Experience
demonstrates that such an one is incapable of properly
directing any great enterprise. Men must be trusted
if you would bring out their capacities. Their
work should be specifically laid out before them;
that is, that which is required of them; not, necessarily,
in minute detail, but the general results that are
to be achieved. Then give them their freedom to
work the problems out in their own way. Give
them responsibility, trust them, and then leave them
alone. Quit your worrying about them. Give
them a fair chance, expect, demand results, and if
they fail, fire them and get those who are more competent.
Mistrust and worry in the employer lead to uncertainty
and worry in the employee and these soon spell out
failure.

In subsequent chapters, various worries are discussed,
with their causes and cures. One thing I cannot
too strongly and too often emphasize, and that is,
that the more one studies the worries referred to,
he is compelled to see the great truth of the proverb,
“More of our worries come from within than from
without.” In other words, we make more
of our worries, by worrying, than are made for us by
the cares of life. This fact in itself should
lead us to be suspicious of every worry that besets
us.

CHAPTER IX

HEALTH WORRIES

There is an army, whose numbers are legion, who worry
about their health and that of the members of their
family. What with the doctors scaring the life
out of them with the germ theory, seeking to obtain
legislation to vaccinate them, examine their children
nude in school, take out their tonsils, appendices,
and other internal organs, inject serums into them
for this, that, and the other, and requiring them to
observe a score and one maxims which they do not understand,
there is no wonder they are worried. Then when
one considers the army of physicians who feel it to
be their duty to write of sickness for the benefit
of the people, who give detailed symptoms of every
disease known; and of the larger army of quacks who
deliberately live and fatten themselves upon the worries
they can create in the minds of the ignorant, the
vicious and the diseased; of the patent-medicine manufacturers,
who spend millions of dollars annually in scaring
people into the use of their nostrums—­none
of which are worth the cost of the paper with which
they are wrapped up—­is there any wonder
that people, who are not trained to think, should be
worried. Worries meet them on every hand, at
every corner. Do they feel an ache or a pain?
According to such a doctor, or such a patent-medicine
advertisement, that is a dangerous symptom which must
be checked at once or the most fearful results will
ensue.

Page 48

Then there are the naturopaths, physicultopaths, gymnastopaths,
hygienists, raw food advocates, and a thousand and
one other notionists, who give advice as to what,
when, and how you shall eat. Horace Fletcher
insists that food be chewed until it is liquid; another
authority says, “Bosh!” to this and asks
you to look at the dog who bolts his meat and is still
healthy, vigorous and strong. The raw food advocate
assures you that the only good food is uncooked, and
that you take out this, that, and the other by cooking,
all of which are essential to the welfare of the body.
Between these natural authorities and the medical
authorities, there is a great deal of warfare
going on all the time, and the layman knows not wherein
true safety lies. Is it any wonder that he is
worried.

Many members of the medical profession and the drug-stores
have themselves to thank for this state of perpetual
worriment and mental unrest. They inculcated,
nurtured, and fostered a colossal ignorance in regard
to the needs of the body, and a tremendous dread and
blind fear of everything that seems the slightest
degree removed from the everyday normal. They
have persistently taught those who rely upon them
that the only safe and wise procedure is to rush immediately
to a physician upon the first sign of anything even
slightly out of the ordinary. Then, with wise
looks, mysterious words, strange symbols, and loathsome
decoctions, they have sent their victims home to imagine
that some marvelous wonder work will follow the swallowing
of their abominable mixtures instead of frankly and
honestly telling their consultants that their fever
was caused by overeating, by too late hours, by dancing
in an ill-ventilated room, by too great application
to business, by too many cocktails, or too much tobacco
smoking.

The results are many and disastrous. People become
confirmed “worriers” about their health.
On the slightest suspicion of an ache or a pain, they
rush to the doctor or the drug-store for a prescription,
a dose, a powder, a potion, or a pill. The telephone
is kept in constant operation about trivialities,
and every month a bill of greater or lesser extent
has to be paid.

While I do not wish to deprecate the calling in of
a physician in any serious case, by those who deem
it advisable, I do condemn as absurd, unnecessary,
and foolish in the highest degree, this perpetual worry
about trivial symptoms of health. Every truthful
physician will frankly tell you—­if you
ask him—­that worrying is often the worst
part of the trouble; in other words, that if you never
did a thing in these cases that distress you, but
would quit your worrying, the discomfort would generally
disappear of its own accord.

One result of this kind of worry is that it genders
a nervousness that unnecessarily calls up to the mind
pictures of a large variety of possible dangers.
Who has not met with this nervous species of worrier?

Page 49

The train enters a tunnel: “What an awful
place for a wreck!” Or it is climbing a mountain
grade with a deep precipice on one side: “My,
if we were to swing off this grade!” I have
heard scores of people, who, on riding up the Great
Cable Incline of the Mount Lowe Railway, have exclaimed:
“What would become of us if this cable were to
break?” and they were apparently people of reason
and intelligence. The fact is, the cable is so
strong and heavy that with two cars crowded to the
utmost, their united weight is insufficient to stretch
the cable tight, let alone putting any strain upon
it sufficient to break it. And most nervous worries
are as baseless as this.

“Yet,” says some apologist for worries,
“accidents do happen. Look at the Eastland
in Chicago, and the loss of the Titanic.
Railways have wrecks, collisions, and accidents.
Horses do run away. Dogs do bite. People
do become sick!”

Granted without debate or discussion. But if
everybody on board the wrecked vessels had worried
for six months beforehand, would their worries have
prevented the wrecks? Mind you, I say worry, not
proper precaution. The shipping authorities,
all railway officials and employees, etc., should
be as alert as possible to guard against all accidents.
But this can be done without one moment’s worry
on the part of a solitary human being, and care is
as different from worry as gold is from dross, coal
from ashes. By all means, take due precautions;
study to avoid the possibility of accidents, but do
not give worry a place in your mind for a moment.

A twin brother to this health-worrier is the nervous
type, who is sure that every dog loose on the streets
is going to bite; every horse driven behind is surely
going to run away; every chauffeur is either reckless,
drunk, or sure to run into a telegraph pole, have
a collision with another car, overturn his car at the
corner, or run down the crossing pedestrian; every
loitering person is a tramp, who is a burglar in disguise;
every stranger is an enemy, or at least must be regarded
with suspicion. Such worriers always seem to prefer
to look on the dark side of the unknown rather than
on the bright side. “Think no evil!”
is good philosophy to apply to everything, as well
as genuine religion—­when put into practice.
The world is in the control of the Powers of Good,
and these seek our good, not our disaster. Have
faith in the goodness of the powers that be, and work
and live to help make your faith true. The man
who sees evil where none exists, will do more to call
it into existence than he imagines, and equally true,
or even more so, is the converse, that he who sees
good where none seems to exist, will call it forth,
bring it to the surface.

The teacher, who imagines that all children are mean
and are merely waiting for a chance to exercise that
meanness, will soon justify his suspicions and the
children will become what he imagines them to be.
Yet such a teacher often little realizes that it has
been his own wicked fears and worries that helped—­to
put it mildly—­the evil assert itself.

Page 50

CHAPTER X

THE WORRIES OF PARENTS

A worrying parent is at once an exasperating and a
pathetic figure. She—­for it is generally
the mother—­is so undeniably influenced by
her love that one can sympathize with her anxiety,
yet the confidant of her child, or the unconcerned
observer is exasperated as he clearly sees the evil
she is creating by her foolish, unnecessary worries.

The worries of parents are protean, as are all other
worries, and those herein named must be taken merely
as suggestions as to scores of others that might be
catalogued and described in detail.

Many mothers worry foolishly because their children
do not obey, are not always thoughtful and considerate,
and act with wisdom, forgetful that life is the school
for learning. If any worrying is to be done,
let the parent worry over her own folly in not learning
how to teach, or train, her child. Line upon
line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a
little, is the natural procedure with children.
It is unreasonable to expect “old heads upon
young shoulders.” Worry, therefore, that
children have not learned before they are taught is
as senseless as it is demoralizing. Get down to
something practical. I know a mother of a large
family of boys and girls. They are as diverse
in character and disposition as one might ever find.
She is one of the wise, sensible, practical mothers,
who acts instead of worrying. For instance, she
believes thoroughly in allowing the children to choose
their own clothing. It develops judgment, taste,
practicability. One of the girls was vain, and
always wanted to purchase shoes too small for her,
in order that she might have “pretty feet.”
Each time she brought home small shoes, her mother
sent her back with admonitions to secure a larger
pair. After this had continued for several times,
she decided upon another plan. When the “too
small” shoes were brought home, she compelled
the girl to wear them, though they pinched and hurt,
until they were worn out, and, as she said in telling
me the story, “that ended that.”

One of her sons was required to get up every morning
and light the fire. Very often he was lazy and
late so that the fire was not lighted when mother
was ready to prepare breakfast. One night he brought
home a companion to spend a day or two. The lads
frolicked together so that they overslept. When
mother got up in the morning, there was no fire.
She immediately walked to the foot of the stairs and
yelled, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
at the top of her voice. In a few moments, both
lads, tousled, half-dressed, and well-scared, rushed
downstairs, exclaiming: “Where’s
the fire? Where’s the fire?” “I
want it in the stove,” was the mother’s
answer—­and “that was the end of that.”

Page 51

The oldest girl became insistent that she be allowed
to sit up nights after the others had gone to bed.
She would study for awhile and then put her head on
her arms and go to sleep. One night her mother
waited until she was asleep, went off to bed, and
left her. At three o’clock in the morning
she came downstairs, lighted lamp in hand, and alarm
clock set to go off. As soon as the alarm-bell
began to ring, the girl awoke, startled to see her
mother standing there with the lighted lamp, herself
cold and stiff with the discomfort of her position.
“And that was the end of that,” said the
mother.

Imagine being the child of an anxious parent, who
sees sickness in every unusual move or mood of her
boy or girl. A little clearing of the throat—­“I’m
sure he’s going to have croup or diphtheria.”
The girl unconsciously puts her hand to her brow—­“What’s
the matter with your head, dearie; got a headache?”
A lad feels a trifle uncomfortable in his clean shirt
and wiggles about—­“I’m sure
Tom’s coming down with fever, he’s so
restless and he looks so flushed!”

God forbid that I should ever appear to caricature
the wise care of a devoted mother. That is not
what I aim to do. I seek, with intenseness of
purpose, to show the folly, the absurdity of the anxieties,
the worries, the unnecessary and unreasonable cares
of many mothers. For the moment Fear takes possession
of them, some kind of nagging is sure to begin for
the child. “Oh, Tom, you mustn’t do
this,” or, “Maggie, my darling, you must
be careful of that,” and the child is not only
nagged, but is thus placed under bondage to the
mother’s unnecessary alarm. No young
life can suffer this bondage without injury. It
destroys freedom and spontaneity, takes away that dash
and vigor, that vim and daring that essentially belong
to youth, and should be the unhampered heritage of
every child. I’d far rather have a boy and
girl of mine get sick once in a while—­though
that is by no means necessary—­than have
them subjected to the constant fear that they might
be sick. And when boys and girls wake up to the
full consciousness that their parents’ worries
are foolish, unnecessary, and self-created, the mental
and moral influence upon them is far more pernicious
than many even of our wisest observers have perceived.

There never was a boy or girl who was worried over,
who was not annoyed, fretted, injured, and cursed
by it, instead of being benefited. The benefit
received from the love of the parent was in spite
of the worry, and not because of it. Worry is
a hindrance, a deterrent, a restraint; it is always
putting a curbing hand upon the natural exuberance
and enthusiasm of youth. It says, “Don’t,
don’t,” with such fierce persistence,
that it kills initiative, destroys endeavor, murders
naturalness, and drives its victims to deception,
fraud, and secrecy to gain what they feel to be natural,
reasonable and desirable ends.

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I verily believe that the parent who forever is saying
“Don’t” to her children, is as dangerous
as a submarine and as cruel as an asphyxiating bomb.
Life is for expression, not repression.
Repression is always a proof that a proper avenue for
expression has not yet been found. Quit your
“don’t-ing,” and teach your child
to “do” right. Children absolutely
are taught to dread, then dislike, and finally to
hate their parents when they are refused the opportunity
of “doing”—­of expressing themselves.

Rather seek to find ways in which they may be active.
Give them opportunities for pleasure, for employment,
for occupation. And remember this, there is as
much distance and difference between “tolerating,”
“allowing,” “permitting” your
children to do things, and “encouraging,”
“fostering” in them the desire to do them,
as there is distance between the poles. Don’t
be a dampener to your children, a discourager, a “don’ter,”
a sign the moment you appear that they must “quit”
something, that they must repress their enthusiasm,
their fun, their exuberant frolicsomeness, but let
them feel your sympathy with them, your comradeship,
your good cheer, that “Father, Mother, is a
jolly good fellow,” and my life for it, you will
doubtless save yourself and them much worry in after
years.

Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Ugly
Duckling is one of the best illustrations of the
uselessness and needlessness of much of the worry
of parents with which I am familiar. How the poor
mother duck worried because one of her brood was so
large and ugly. At first she was willing to accept
it, but when everybody else jeered at it, pushed it
aside, bit at it, pecked it on the head, and generally
abused it, and the turkey-cock bore down upon it like
a ship in full sail, and gobbled at it, and its brothers
and sisters hunted it, grew more and more angry with
it, and wished the cat would get it and swallow it
up, she herself wished it far and far away. And
as the worries grew around the poor duckling, it ran
away. It didn’t know enough to have faith
in itself and its own future. The result was the
worries of others affected it to the extent of urging
it to flee. For the time being this enlarged
its worries, until at length, falling in with a band
of swans, it felt a strange thrill of fellowship with
them in spite of their grand and beautiful appearance,
and, soaring into the air after them, it alighted
into the water, and seeing its own reflection, was
filled with amazement and wonder to find itself no
longer an ugly duckling but—­a swan.

Many a mother, father, family generally, have worried
over their ugly duckling until they have driven him,
her, out into the world, only to find out later that
their duckling was a swan. And while it was good
for the swan to find out its own nature, the points
I wish to make are that there was no need for all
the worry—­it was the sign of ignorance,
of a want of perception—­and further, the
swan would have developed in its home nest just as
surely as it did out in the world, and would have
been saved all the pain and distress its cruel family
visited upon it.

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There is still another story, which may as well be
introduced here, as it applies to the unnecessary
worry of parents about their young. In this case,
it was a hen that sat on a nest of eggs. When
the chickens were hatched, they all pleased the mother
hen but one, and he rushed to the nearest pond, and,
in spite of her fret, fuss, fume, and worry, insisted
upon plunging in. In vain the hen screamed out
that he would drown, her unnatural child was resolved
to venture, and to the amazement of all, he floated
perfectly, for he was a duck instead of a chicken,
and his egg was placed under the old hen by mistake.

Mother, father, don’t worry about your child.
It may be he is a swan; he may be a duck, instead
of the creature you anticipated. Control your
fretfulness and your worry for it cannot possibly change
things. Wait and watch developments and a few
days may reveal enough to you to show you how totally
unnecessary all your worries would have been.
Teach yourself to know that worry is evil thought directed
either upon our own bodies or minds, or those of others.
Note, I say evil thought. It is not good
thought. Good thought so directed would be helpful,
useful, beneficial. This is injurious, harmful,
baneful. Evil thought, worry, directs to the
person, or to that part of the body considered, an
injurious and baneful influence that produces pain,
inharmony, unhappiness. It is as if one were to
divert a stream of corroding acid upon a sensitive
wound, and do it because we wished to heal the wound.
Worry never once healed a wound, or cured an ill.
It always aggravates, irritates, and, furthermore,
helps superinduce the evil the worrier is afraid of.
The fact that you worry about these things to which
I have referred, that you yield your thoughts to them,
and, in your worry, give undue contemplation to them,
induces the conditions you wish to avoid or avert.
Hence, if you wish your child to be well and strong,
brave and courageous, it is the height of cruelty
for you to worry over his health, his play, or his
exercise. Better by far leave him alone than
bring upon him the evils you dread. Who has not
observed, again and again, the evil that has come from
worrying mothers who were constantly cautioning or
forbidding their children to do that which every natural
and normal child longs to do? Quit your worrying.
Leave your child alone. Better by far let him
break a rib, or bruise his nose, than all the time
to live in the bondage of your fears.

Elsewhere I have referred to the fact that we often
bring upon our loved ones the perils we fear.
There is a close connection between our mental states
and the objects with which we are surrounded.
Or, mayhap, it would be more correct to say that it
is our mental condition that shapes the actions of
those around us in relation to the things by which
they are surrounded. Let me illustrate with an
incident which happened in my own observation.
A small boy and girl had a nervous, ever worrying

Page 54

mother. She was assured that her boy was bound
to come to physical ill, for he was so courageous,
so adventuresome, so daring. To her he was the
duck instead of the chicken she thought she was hatching
out. One day he climbed to the roof of the barn.
His sister followed him. The two were slowly,
and in perfect security, “inching” along
on the comb of the roof, when the mother happened
to catch sight of them. With a scream of half
terror and half anger, she shouted to them to come
down at once! Up to that moment, I had watched
both children with comfort, pleasure, and assurance
of their perfect safety. Their manifest delight
in their elevated position, the pride of the girl
in her pet brother’s courage, and his scarcely
concealed surprise and pleasure that she should dare
to follow him, were interesting in the extreme.
But the moment that foolish mother’s scream
rent the air, everything changed instanter. Both
children became nervous, the boy started down the roof,
where he could drop upon a lower roof to safety.
His little sister, however, started down too soon.
Her mother’s fears unnerved her and she slid,
and falling some twenty-five feet or so, broke her
arm.

Then—­and here was the cruel fatuity of
the whole proceeding—­the mother began to
wail and exclaim to the effect that it was just what
she expected. May I be pardoned for calling her
a worrying fool. She could not see that it was
her very expectation, and giving voice to it, in her
hourly worryings and in that command that they come
down, that caused the accident. She, herself,
alone was to blame; her unnecessary worry was the
cause of her daughter’s broken arm.

Christ’s constant incitement to his disciples
was “Be not afraid!” He was fully aware
of the fact that Job declared: “The thing
which I greatly feared is come upon me.”

Hence, worrying mother, curb your worry, kill it,
drive it out, for your child’s sake.
You claim it is for your child’s good that you
worry. You are wrong. It is because you are
too thoughtless, faithless, and trustless that you
worry, and, if you will pardon me, too selfish.
If, instead of giving vent to that fear, worry, dread,
you exercised your reason and faith a little more,
and then self-denial, and refused to give vocal expression
to your worry, you could then claim unselfishness
in the interest of your child. But to put your
fears and worries, your dreads and anxieties, around
a young child, destroying his exuberance and joy,
surrounding him with the mental and spiritual fogs
that beset your own life is neither wise, kind, nor
unselfish.

Another serious worry that besets many parents is
that pertaining to the courtship or engagement of
their children. Here again let me caution my
readers not to construe my admonitions into indifference
to this important epoch in their child’s life.
I would have them lovingly, wisely, sagely advise.
But there is a vast difference between this, and the
uneasy, fretful, nagging worries that beset so many
parents and which often lead to serious friction.
Remember that it is your child, not you, who has to
be suited with a life partner. The girl who may
call forth his warmest affection may be the last person
in the world you would have chosen, yet you are not
the one to be concerned.

Page 55

In the January, 1916, Ladies’ Home Journal
there is an excellent editorial bearing upon this
subject, as follows:

A mother got to worrying about the girl
to whom her son had become engaged. She was
a nice girl, but the mother felt that perhaps
she was not of a type to stimulate the son sufficiently
in his career. The mother wisely said nothing,
however, until two important facts dawned upon
her:

First, that possibly her boy was of
the order which did not need stimulation.
As she reflected upon his nature, his temperament,
she arrived at the conclusion that what he required
in a life partner might be someone who would prove
a poultice rather than a mustard plaster or a
fly blister.

This was her first discovery.

The second was not precisely like unto
it, but was even more important—­that
the son, and not the mother, was marrying the girl.
The question as to whether or not the girl would suit
the mother as a permanent companion was a minor
consideration about which she need not vex her
soul. The point he had settled for himself
was that here, by God’s grace, was the one
maid for him; and since that had been determined the
wise course was for the mother not to waste time
and energy bemusing (worrying) herself over the
situation, especially as the girl offered no fundamental
objections.

Thus the mother, of herself,
learned a lesson that many
another mother might profitably
learn.

How wonderfully in his Saul does Robert Browning
set forth the opposite course to that of the worrier.
Here, the active principle of love and trust are called
upon so that it uplifts and blesses its object.
David is represented as filled with a great love for
Saul, which would bring happiness to him. He
strives in every way to make Saul happy, yet the king
remains sad, depressed, and unhappy. At last
David’s heart and his reason grasp the one great
fact of God’s transcending love, and the poem
ends with a burst of rapture. His discovery is
that, if his heart is so full of love to Saul, that
in his yearning for his good, he would give him everything,
what must God’s love for him be? Of his
own love he cries:

Could I help thee, my father, inventing
a bliss,
I would add, to that life of the past,
both the future and
this;

I would give thee new life altogether,
as good, ages hence,
At this moment,—­had love but
the warrant love’s heart to
dispense.

Then, when God’s magnificent love bursts upon
him he sings in joy:

—­What, my soul? see thus far
and no farther? When doors great and small

Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch,
should the hundredth appall?

How utterly absurd, on the face of it, is such a supposition.
God having given so much will surely continue to give.
His love so far proven so great, it will never
cease.

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O! doubting heart of man, of woman, of father, of
mother, grieving over the mental and spiritual lapses
of a loved one, grasp this glorious fact—­God’s
love far transcends thine own. What thou wouldst
do for thy loved one is a minute fraction of what He
can do, will do, is doing. Rest in His
love. He will not fail thee nor forsake thee;
and in His hands all whom thou lovest are safe.

CHAPTER XI

MARITAL WORRIES

I now approach a difficult part of my subject, yet
I do it without trepidation, fear, or worry as to
results. There are, to my mind, a few fundamental
principles to be considered and observed, and each
married couple must learn to fight the battle out for
themselves.

Undoubtedly, to most married people, the ideal relationship
is where each is so perfectly in accord with the other—­they
think alike, agree, are as one mentally—­that
there are no irritations, no differences of opinion,
no serious questions to discuss.

Others have a different ideal. They do not object
to differences, serious, even, and wide. They
are so thorough believers in the sanctity of the individuality
of each person—­that every individual must
live his own life, and thus learn his own lessons,
that what they ask is a love large enough, big enough,
sympathetic enough, to embrace all differences, and
in confidence that the “working out” process
will be as sure for one as the other, to rest, content
and serene in each other’s love in spite of
the things that otherwise would divide them.

This mental attitude, however, requires a large faith
in God, a wonderful belief in the good that is in
each person, and a forbearing wisdom that few possess.
Nevertheless, it is well worth striving for, and its
possession is more desirable than many riches.
And how different the outlook upon life from that
of the marital worrier. When a couple begin to
live together, they have within themselves the possibilities
of heaven or of hell. The balance between the
two, however, is very slight. There is only a
foot, or less, in difference, between the West and
the East on the Transcontinental Divide. I have
stood with one foot in a rivulet the waters of which
reached the Pacific, and the other in one which reached
the Atlantic. The marital divide is even finer
than that. It is all in the habit of mind.
If one determines that he, she, will guide, boss,
direct, control the other, one of two or three things
is sure to occur.

I. The one mind will control the other, and
an individual will live some one else’s life
instead of its own. This is the popular American
notion of the life of the English wife. She has
been trained during the centuries to recognize her
husband as lord and master, and she unquestionably
and unhesitatingly obeys his every dictate. Without
at all regarding this popular conception as an accurate
one, nationally, it will serve the purpose of illustration.

Page 57

II. The second alternative is one of sullen submission.
If one hates to “row,” to be “nagged,”
he, she, submits, but with a bad grace, consumed constantly
with an inward rebellion, which destroys love, leads
to cowardly subterfuges, deceptions, and separations.

III. The third outcome is open rebellion, and
the results of this are too well known to need elucidation—­for
whatever they may be, they are disastrous to the peace,
happiness, and content of the family relationship.

Yet to show how hard it is to classify actual cases
in any formal way, let me here introduce what I wrote
long ago about a couple whom I have visited many times.
It is a husband and wife who are both geniuses—­far
above the ordinary in several lines. They have
money—­made by their own work—­the
wife’s as well as the husband’s, for she
is an architect and builder of fine homes. While
they have great affection one for another, there is
a constant undertone of worry in their lives.
Each is too critical of the other. They worry
about trifles. Each is losing daily the sweetness
of sympathetic and joyous comradeship because they
do not see eye to eye in all things. Where a
mutual criticism of one’s work is agreed upon,
and is mutually acceptable and unirritating, there
is no objection to it. Rather should it be a
source of congratulation that each is so desirous of
improving that criticism is welcomed. But, in
many cases, it is a positive and injurious irritant.
One meets with criticism, neither kind nor gentle,
out in the world. In the home, both man and woman
need tenderness, sympathy, comradeship—­and
if there be weaknesses or failures that are openly
or frankly confessed, there should be the added grace
and virtue of compassion without any air of pitying
condescension or superiority. By all means help
each other to mend, to improve, to reach after higher,
noble things, but don’t do it by the way of
personal criticism, advice, remonstrance, fault-finding,
worrying. If you do, you’ll do far more
harm than good in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred.
Every human being instinctively, in such position,
consciously or unconsciously, places himself in the
attitude of saying: “I am what I am!
Now recognize that, and leave me alone! My life
is mine to learn its lessons in my own way, just the
same as yours is to learn your lessons in your way.”
This worrying about, and of each other has proven
destructive of much domestic happiness, and has wrecked
many a marital barque, that started out with sails
set, fair wind, and excellent prospects.

Don’t worry about each other—­help
each other by the loving sympathy that soothes and
comforts. Example is worth a million times more
than precept and criticism, no matter how lovingly
and wisely applied, and few men and women are wise
enough to criticise and advise perpetually,
without giving the recipient the feeling that he is
being “nagged.”

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Granted that, from the critic’s standpoint,
every word said may be true, wise, and just.
This does not, by any means, make it wise to say it.
The mental and spiritual condition of the recipient
must be considered as of far more importance
than the condition of the giver of the wise exhortations.
The latter is all right, he doesn’t need such
admonitions; the other does. The important question,
therefore, should be: “Is he ready to receive
them?” If not, if the time is unpropitious,
the mental condition inauspicious, better do, say,
nothing, than make matters worse. But, unfortunately,
it generally happens that at such times the critic
is far more concerned at unbosoming himself of his
just and wise admonitions than he is as to whether
the time is ripe, the conditions the best possible,
for the word to be spoken. The sacred writer
has something very wise and illuminating to say upon
this subject. Solomon says: “A word
spoken in due season, how good is it!” Note,
however, that it must be spoken “in due season,”
to be good. The same word spoken out of season
may be, and often is, exceedingly bad. Again
he says: “A word fitly spoken is like apples
of gold in pictures of silver.” But it must
be fitly spoken to be worthy to rank with apples
of gold.

CHAPTER XII

THE WORRY OF THE SQUIRREL CAGE

Reference has already been made to The Squirrel
Cage, by Dorothy Canfield. Better than any
book I have read for a long time, it reveals the causes
of much of the worry that curses our modern so-called
civilized life. These causes are complex and various.
They include vanity, undue attention to what our
neighbors think of us, a false appreciation of the
values of things, and they may all be summed up
into what I propose to call—­with due acknowledgement
to Mrs. Canfield—­the Worry of the Squirrel
Cage.

I will let the author express her own meaning of this
latter term. If the story leading up seems to
be long please seek to read it in the light of this
expression:[A]

[Footnote A: Reprinted from “The Squirrel-Cage”
by Dorothy Canfield ($1.35 net); published by Henry
Holt and Company, New York City.]

When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after
their wedding in a small Central New York village,
had gone West to Ohio, they had spent their tiny
capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage,
ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning
popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of
their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home.
Every step in the long series of changes which
had led from its first state to its last had a
profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys
and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated,
with the right kind of wood work in every room
that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively
artistic effects in decoration, represented their

Page 59

culminating well-earned position in the inner circle
of the best society of Endbury.

Moreover, they felt that just as the
house had been attained with effort, self-denial,
and careful calculations, yet still without incurring
debt, so their social position had been secured
by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss
of self-respect or even of dignity. They
were honestly proud of both their house and of
their list of acquaintances and saw no reason
to regard them as less worthy achievements of an industrious
life than their four creditable grown-up children
or Judge Emery’s honorable reputation at
the bar.

The two older children, George and Marietta,
could remember those early struggling days with
as fresh an emotion as that of their parents.
Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed
matron of thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous
colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave
of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period
when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.

The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at
the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper
crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had
discarded chromos as much as five years before.
Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the
honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves
at the cold monotony of her black and white engravings.
The artlessness of this wonder struck shame to
their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at
their own highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped
mountain-peaks. Marietta could recall as
piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen
a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their
parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes
open for the first time to the futility of its
claim to sophistication. As for the incident
that had led to the permanent retiring from their
table of the monumental salt-and-pepper ‘caster’
which had been one of their most prized wedding
presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves
to remember it, so intolerably did it spell humiliation.

In these quotations the reader has the key to the
situation—­worry to become as good as one’s
neighbors, if not better. This is the worry of
the squirrel cage.

Lydia is Mrs. Emery’s baby girl, her pet, her
passionate delight. She has been away to a fine
school. She knows nothing of the ancient struggles
to attain position and a high place in society.
Those struggles were practically over before she appeared
on the scene.

On the occasion of her final home-coming her mother
makes great preparations to please her, yet the worry
and the anxiety, are revealed in her conversation
with her older daughter:

Page 60

’Oh, Marietta, how do you
suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she
has seen so much? I hope she won’t be disappointed.
I’ve done so much to it this last year, perhaps
she won’t like it. And oh, I was
so tired because we weren’t able to get
the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!’

’Really, Mother, you
must draw the line about Lydia. She’s
only human. I guess if
the house is good enough for you and
father it is good enough for
her.’

’That’s just it,
Marietta—­that’s just what came over
me!Is what’s good
enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won’t
anything, even the best, in
Endbury be a come-down for her?’

The attainments of Mrs. Emery both as to wealth and
social position, however, were not reached by her
daughter Marietta and her husband, but in the determination
to make it appear as if they were, Marietta thus exposes
her own life of worry in a talk with her father:

’Keeping up a two-maid and a man
establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly
not being able to hire the one maid. There aren’t
any girls to be had lately. It means that
I have to be the other maid and the man all of
the time, and all three, part of the time.’
She was starting down the step, but paused as
though she could not resist the relief that came from
expression. ’And the cost of living—­the
necessities are bad enough, but the other things—­the
things you have to have not to be out of everything!
I lie awake nights. I think of it in church.
I can’t think of anything else but the way the
expenses mount up. Everybody getting so reckless
and extravagant and I won’t go in
debt! I’ll come to it, though. Everybody
else does. We’re the only people that haven’t
oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts—­and
everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton
for Ellen’s appendicitis, and their grocer
told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars—­well,
they have just got an oriental rug that they paid
a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert
said they ’just had to have it, and
you can always have what you have to have.’
It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common!
And the last dinner party we gave cost—­’

Another phase of the squirrel cage worry is
expressed in this terse paragraph:

’Father keeps talking about getting
one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they
are so new you can’t tell what they are
going to be. She says they may get to be too
common.’

Bye and bye it comes Lydia’s turn to decide
what place she and her new husband are to take in
Endbury society, and here is what one frank, sensible
man says about it:

Page 61

’It may be all right for Marietta
Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches
to keep what bores her to death to have—­a
social position in Endbury’s two-for-a-cent society,
but, for the Lord’s sake, why do they make
such a howling and yelling just at the tree when
Lydia’s got the tragically important question
to decide as to whether that’s what she
wants? It’s like expecting her to do
a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake.’

And the following chapter is a graphic presentation
as to how Lydia made her choice “in perfect
freedom”—­oh, the frightful sarcasm
of the phrase—­during the excitement of
the wedding preparations and under the pressure of
expensive gifts and the ideas of over enthusiastic
“society” friends.

Lydia now began her own “squirrel-cage”
existence, even her husband urges her into extravagance
in spite of her protest by saying, “Nothing’s
too good for you. And besides, it’s an asset.
The mortgage won’t be so very large. And
if we’re in it, we’ll just have to live
up to it. It’ll be a stimulus.”

One of the sane characters of the book is dear, lovable,
gruff Mr. Melton, who is Lydia’s godfather,
and her final awakening is largely due to him.
One day he finds Lydia’s mother upstairs sick-a-bed,
and thus breaks forth to his godchild:

’About your mother—­I
know without going upstairs that she is floored
with one or another manifestation of the great disease
of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself.
It’s not so bad as it seems when you’ve
got the right doctor, I’ve practiced for
thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can’t
spring anything new on me. I’ve taken
your mother through doily fever induced by the
change from tablecloths to bare tops, through portiere
inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through
art-nouveau prostration and mission furniture
palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute
insanity over the necessity of having her maids
wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever
dodge the old malady is working on her.’

And later in speaking of Lydia’s sister he affirms:

’Your sister Marietta is not a
very happy woman. She has too many of your
father’s brains for the life she’s been
shunted into. She might be damming up a big
river with a finely constructed concrete dam,
and what she is giving all her strength to is
trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her
bare hands. The achievement of her life is to
give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance
of having five thousand like your father.
She does it; she’s a remarkably forceful
woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better
business, and she knows it, though she won’t
admit it.’

Oh, the pity of it, the woe of it, the horror of it,
for it is one of the curses of our present day society
and is one of the causes of many a man’s and
woman’s physical and mental ruin. In the
words of our author elsewhere:

Page 62

They are killing themselves
to get what they really don’t want
and don’t need, and
are starving for things they could easily
have by just putting out their
hands.

Where life’s struggle is reduced to this kind
of thing, there is little compensation, hence we are
not surprised to read that:

Judge Emery was in the state in which
of late the end of the day’s work found
him—­overwhelmingly fatigued. He had
not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his
wife’s tocsin, while she was almost crying
with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia’s course
ran smooth through a thousand complications was not
accomplished without an incalculable expenditure
of nervous force on her mother’s part.
Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted
that he would have his old patient back under his
care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy,
was now moved by his wife’s pale agitation
to a heart-sickening mixture or apprehension for
her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort
whenever she was sick.

Yet in spite of this intense tension, she was unable
to stop—­felt she must go on, until finally,
a breakdown intervened and she was compelled to lay
by.

On another page a friend tells of his great-aunt’s
experience:

’She told me that all through
her childhood her family was saving and pulling
together to build a fine big house. They worked
along for years until, when she was a young lady, they
finally accomplished it; built a big three-story
house that was the admiration of the countryside.
Then they moved in. And it took the womenfolks
every minute of their time, and more to keep it
clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
heated, furnished, repaired, painted and everything
the way a fine house should be, as their entire
living used to cost. The fine big grounds
they had laid out to go with the mansion took so
much time to—­’

Finally Lydia herself becomes awakened, startled as
she sees what everybody is trying to make her life
become and she bursts out to her sister:

’I’m just frightened of—­everything—­what
everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing
all my life, and never have any time but to just
hurry faster and faster, so there’ll be more
things to hurry about, and never talk about anything
but things!’ She began to tremble
and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort
to control herself, though she burst out at the
sight of Mrs. Mortimer’s face of despairing
bewilderment. ’Oh, don’t tell
me you don’t see at all what I mean.
I can’t say it! But you must understand.
Can’t we somehow all stop—­now!
And start over again! You get muslin curtains
and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing
about whom to invite to that party—­that’s
going to cost more than he can afford, Father
says—­it makes me sick to be costing
him so much. And not fuss about having clothes

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just so—­and Paul have our house built
little and plain, so it won’t be so much
work to take care of it and keep it clean. I
would so much rather look after it myself than to have
him kill himself making money so I can hire maids
that you can’t—­you say
yourself you can’t—­and never having
any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other
people might, and we’d all have more time
to like things that make us nicer to like.

And when her sister tried to comfort her she continued:

’You do see what I mean!
You see how dreadful it is to look forward to
just that—­being so desperately troubled
over things that don’t really matter—­and—­and
perhaps having children, and bringing them to
the same thing—­when there must be so
many things that do matter!’

Then, to show how perfectly her sister understood,
the author makes that wise and perceptive woman exclaim:

’Mercy! Dr. Melton’s
right! She’s perfectly wild with nerves!
We must get her married as
soon as ever we can!’

Lydia gives a reception. Here is part of the
description:

Standing as they were, tightly pressed
in between a number of different groups, their
ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian
conversation that gave a singular illusion as
if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source,
the individuality of the voices being lost in the
screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth
had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression
under the circumstances.

They heard: ’For over
a month and the sleeves were too see you again
at Mrs. Elliott’s I’m pouring there from
four I’ve got to dismiss one with plum-colored
bows all along five dollars a week and the washing
out and still impossible! I was there myself
all the time and they neither of thirty-five cents
a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations
was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy
under the brought up in one big braid and caught
down with at Peterson’s they were pink and
white with—­’ ... ’Oh, no,
Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame’s.’
Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump into the din
and sank from her brother’s sight, vociferating:
’The Petersons had them of old gold, don’t
you remember, with little—­’

The doctor, worming his way desperately
through the masses of femininity, and resisting
all attempts to engage him in the local fray,
emerged at length into the darkened hall where the
air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of
imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie
and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner,
sat Lydia’s father alone. He held in
one hand a large platter piled high with wafer-like
sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan
rate, and as he ate, he smiled to himself.

‘Well, Mr. Ogre,’
said the doctor, sitting down beside him
with a gasp of relief; ’let
a wave-worn mariner into your den,
will you?’

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Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery’s
smile broke into an open laugh. He waved
the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms:
’A boiler factory ain’t in it with woman,
lovely woman, is it?’ he put it to his friend.

’Gracious powers! There’s
nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!’
the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery.
’I don’t know which makes me sicker; to
stay in there and listen to them, or come out
here and find you thinking they’re funny!’

They are funny!’ insisted the
Judge tranquilly. ’I stood by the door
and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch,
till I thought I should have a fit. I never
heard anything funnier on the stage.’

‘Looky here, Nat,’ the doctor
stared up at him angrily, ’they’re
not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays
and then laughed at! They’re the other half
of a whole that we’re half of, and don’t
you forget it! Why in the world should you
think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick
all winter and have nervous prostration all summer
to pay for it? You’d lock up a man
as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so.
What they’re like, and what they do with their
time and strength concerns us enough sight more than
what the tariff is, let me tell you.’

’I admit that what your wife is
like concerns you a whole lot!’ The Judge
laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little
old bachelor. ’Don’t commence jumping
on the American woman so! I won’t stand
it! She’s the noblest of her sex!’

‘Do you know why I am
bald?’ said Dr. Melton, running his hand
over his shining dome.

‘If I did, I wouldn’t
admit it,’ the Judge put up a cautious
guard, ’because I foresee
that whatever I say will be used as
evidence against me.’

’I’ve torn out all my hair
in desperation at hearing such men as you claim
to admire and respect and wish to advance the American
woman. You don’t give enough thought to
her—­real thought—­from one
year’s end to another to know whether you think
she has an immortal soul or not!’

Later Lydia’s husband insists that they give
a dinner.

It was to be a large dinner—­large,
that is, for Endbury—­of twenty covers,
and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many
guests. The number of objects necessary for the
conventional setting of a dinner table appalled
her. She was so tired, and her attention
was so fixed on the complicated processes going
on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain reeled
over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates
and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths
on a festal occasion. They persistently eluded
her attempts to marshal them into order.
She discovered that she had put forks for the soup—­that
in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for
an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon

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of iron, a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety.
When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told
him with a wavering laugh, ’If I tried as hard
for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I’ve tried
all day to have this dinner right, I’d certainly
have a front seat in the angel choir. If
anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it’ll
be because he’s harder to please than St.
Peter himself.’

During the evening:

Lydia seemed to herself to be in an
endless bad dream. The exhausting efforts
of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of
fatigue through which she felt but dully the successive
stabs of the ill-served unsuccessful dinner. At
times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair
to keep her balance. She did not know that
she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
nothing. She was only conscious of an intense
longing for the end of things, and darkness and
quiet.

When it was all over and her husband was compelled
to recognize that it had been a failure, his mental
attitude is thus expressed:

He had determined to preserve at all
costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself
to be. No force, he thought grimly, shutting
his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of his
real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous
resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter
as he walked about, locking doors and windows,
and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening.
If he was to restrain himself from saying, he
would at least allow himself the privilege of feeling
all that was possible to a man deeply injured.

And that night Lydia felt for the “first time
the quickening to life of her child. And during
all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she
was to know motherhood.” Can words more
forcefully depict the worry of the squirrel-cage
than this—­that an unnecessary dinner, given
in unnecessary style, at unnecessary expense, to visitors
to whom it was unnecessary should have driven from
her thought, and doubtless seriously injured, the
new life that she was so soon to give to the world?

Oh, men and women of divine descent and divine heritage,
quit your squirrel-cage stage of existence. Is
life to be one mere whirling around of the cage of
useless toil or pleasure, of mere imagining that you
are doing something? Work with an object.
Know your object, that it is worthy the highest endeavor
of a human being, and then pursue it with a divine
enthusiasm that no obstacle can daunt, an ardor that
no weariness can quench. Then it is you will
begin to live. There is no life in worry.
Worry is a waste of life. If you are a worrier,
that is a proof you (in so far as you worry) do not
appreciate the value of your own life, for a worthy
object, a divine enthusiasm, a noble ardor are in

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themselves the best possible preventives against worry.
They dignify life above worry. Worry is undignified,
petty, paltry. Where you know you have something
to do worth doing, you are conscious of the Divine
Benediction, and who can worry when the smile of God
rests upon him? This is a truism almost to triteness,
and yet how few fully realize it. It is the unworthy
potterers with life, the dabblers in life-stuff, those
who blind themselves to their high estate, those who
are unsure of their footing who worry. The true
aristocrat is never worried about his position; the
orator convinced of the truth of his message worries
not as to how it will be received; the machinist sure
of his plans hesitates not in the construction of his
machinery; the architect assured of his accuracy pushes
on his builders without hesitancy or question, fear,
or alarm; the engineer knowing his engine and his
destination has no heart quiver as he handles the lever.
It is the doubter, the unsure, the aimless, the dabbler,
the frivolous, the dilettante, the uncertain that
worry. How nobly Browning set this forth in his
Epilogue:

What had I on
earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the
unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless,
did I drivel
—­Being—­Who?
One who never turned his back but marched
breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would
break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted,
wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight
better,
Sleep to wake.
No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s
worktime
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either
should be,
‘Strive and thrive!’ cry ’Speed,—­fight
on, fare ever
There as here!’

And this is not “mere poetry.” Or
rather it is because it is “mere poetry”
that it is real life. Browning had nearly
seventy years of it. He knew. Where there
are those to whom “God has whispered in the
ear,” there is no uncertainty, no worry.
The musician who knows his instrument, knows his music,
knows his key, and knows his time to play never hesitates,
never falters, never worries. With tone clear,
pure, strong, and certain, he sends forth his melodies
or harmonies into the air. Cannot you, in your
daily life, be a true and sure musician? Cannot
you be certain—­absolutely, definitely
certain—­of your right to play the tune
of life in the way you have it marked out before you,
and then go ahead and play! Play, in God’s
name, as God’s and man’s music-maker.

CHAPTER XIII

RELIGIOUS WORRIES AND WORRIERS

Misunderstandings, misconceptions, and ignorance in
regard to what really is religion have caused countless
millions to mourn—­and worry; indeed, far
more to worry than to mourn. Religion should be
a joyous thing, the bringing of the son and daughter
into close relationship with the Father. Instead,
for centuries, it has been a battle for creeds, for
mental assent to certain doctrines, rather than a growth
in brotherhood and loving relationship, and those who
could not see eye to eye with one another deemed it
to be their duty to fight and worry each other—­even
to their death.

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This is not the place for any theological discussion;
nor is it my intent to present the claims of any church
or creed. Each reader must do that for himself,
and the less he worries over it, the better I think
it will be for him. I have read and reread Cardinal
Newman’s wonderful Pro Apologia—­his
statement as to why and how he entered the bosom of
the Roman Catholic Church, and it has thrilled me with
its pathos and evidence of deep spiritual endeavor.
Charles Warren Stoddard’s Troubled Heart
and How It Found Rest is another similar story,
though written by an entirely different type of man.
Each of these books revealed the inner thought and
life of men who were worried about religion, and by
worry I mean anxious to the point of abnormality,
disturbed, distressed unnecessarily. Yet I would
not be misunderstood. Far be it from me, in this
age of gross materialism and worship of physical power
and wealth, to decry in the least a proper degree
of solicitude for one’s personal salvation.
The religious life of the individual—­the
real, deep, personal, hidden, unseen, inner life of
a human soul—­is a wonderfully delicate thing,
to be touched by another only with the profoundest
love and deepest wisdom. Hence I have little
to say about one’s own inner struggles, except
to affirm and reaffirm that wisdom, sanity, and religion
itself are all against worrying about it.
Study religion, consider it, accept it, follow it,
earnestly, seriously, and constantly, but do it in
a rational manner, seeking the essentials, accepting
them and then resting in them to the full and
utter exclusion of all worry.

But there is another class of religious worriers,
viz., those who worry themselves about your
salvation. Again I would not be misunderstood,
nor thought to decry a certain degree of solicitude
about the spiritual welfare of those we love, but here
again the caution and warning against worry more than
ever holds good. Most of these worriers have
found comfort, joy, and peace in a certain line of
thought, which has commended itself to them as Truth—­the
one, full, complete, indivisible Truth, and it seems
most natural for human nature to be eager that others
should possess it. This is the secret of the
zeal of the street Salvationist, whose flaming ardor
is bent on reaching those who seldom, if ever, go
to church. The burden of his cry is that you
must flee from the wrath to come—­hell—­by
accepting the vicarious atonement made by the “blood
of Jesus.” In season and out of season,
he urges that you “come under the blood.”
His face is tense, his brow wrinkled, his eyes strained,
his voice raucous, his whole demeanor full of worry
over the salvation of others.

Another friend is a Seventh Day Adventist, who is
full of zeal for the declaration of the “Third
Angel’s Message,” for he believes that
only by heeding it, keeping sacred the hours from sunset
on Friday to Saturday sunset, in accordance with his
reading of the fourth commandment, and also believing
in the speedy second coming of Christ, can one’s
soul’s salvation be attained.

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The Baptist is assured that his mode of baptism—­complete
immersion—­is the only one that satisfies
the demands of heaven, and the more rigorous members
of the sect refuse communion with those who have not
obeyed, as they see the command. The members of
the “Christian” Church—­as the
disciples of Alexander Campbell term themselves—­while
they assent that they are tied to no creed except
the New Testament, demand immersion as a prerequisite
to membership in their body. The Methodist, Congregationalist,
Presbyterian, Nazarene, and many others, are “evangelical”
in their belief, as is a large portion of the Church
of England, and its American offshoot, both of which
are known as the Episcopal Church. Another portion,
however, of this church is known as “ritualistic,”
and the two branches in England recently became so
involved in a heated discussion as to the propriety
of certain of their bishops partaking in official deliberations
with ministers of the other, but outside, evangelistic
churches, that for a time it seemed as if the whole
Episcopal Church would be disrupted by the fierceness
and anger gendered in the differences of opinion.

To my own mind, all this worry was much ado about
nothing. Each man’s brain and conscience
must guide him in matters of this kind, and the worry,
fret, stew, evolved out of the matter, seem to me a
proof that real religion had little to do with it.

Recently one good brother came to me with tears in
his voice, if not in his eyes, worried seriously as
to my own religious belief because I had asserted
in a public address that I believed the earnest prayer
of a good Indian woman reached the ear of God as surely
as did my own prayers, or those of any man, woman,
minister, or priest living. To him the only effective
prayers were “evangelical” prayers—­whatever
that may mean—­and he was deeply distressed
and fearfully worried because I could not see eye
to eye with him in this matter. And a dear, good
woman, who heard a subsequent discussion of the subject,
was so worried over my attitude that she felt impelled
to assure me when I left that “she would pray
for me.”

I have friends who are zealous Roman Catholics, and
a number of them are praying that I may soon enter
the folds of “Mother Church,” and yet
my Unitarian and Universalist friends wonder why I
retain my membership in any “orthodox”
church. On the other hand, my New Thought friends
declare that I belong to them by the spirit of the
messages I have given to the world. Then, too,
my Theosophist friends—­and I have many—­present
to me, with a force I do not attempt to controvert,
the doctrine of the Universal Brotherhood of Mankind,
and urge upon me acceptance of the comforting and
helpful doctrine, to them, of Reincarnation.

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Not long prior to this writing a good earnest man
buttonholed me and held me tight for over an hour,
while he outlined his own slight divergencies from
the teachings of the Methodist Church, to which he
belongs, and his interpretation of the symbolism of
Scripture, none of which had the slightest interest
to me. In our conversation, he expressed himself
as quite willing—­please note the condescension—­to
allow me the privilege of supposing the Catholic was
honest and sincere in his faith and belief, but
he really could not for one moment allow the same
to the Christian Scientist, who, from his standpoint,
denied the atonement and the Divinity of Christ.
I suppose if he ever picks up this booklet and reads
what I am now going to write, he will regard me as
a reprobate and lost beyond the possibility of salvation.
Nevertheless, I wish to put on record that I regard
his attitude as one of intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism,
and impudence—­sheer, unadulterated impertinence.
Who made him the judge of the thoughts and acts of
other men’s inner lives? Who gave to him
the wisdom and power of discernment to know that he
was right and these others wrong? Poor, arrogant
fool. His worries were not the result of genuine
affection and deep human sympathy, the irrepressible
and uncontrollable desires and longings of his heart
to bring others into the full light of God’s
love, but of his overweening self-confidence in his
own wisdom and judgment. And I say this in no
personal condemnation of him, for I have now even forgotten
who it was, but in condemnation of the spirit in which
he and all his ilk ever act.

Hence, my dear reader, if you are of his class, I
say to you earnestly: Don’t worry about
other people’s salvation. It may be they
are nearer saved than you are. No man can’
be “worried” into accepting anything,
even though you may deem it the only Truth.
I have known men whom others regarded as agnostics
who had given more study to the question of personal
religion than any ten of their critics. I can
recall three—­all of whom were men of wonderful
mentality and great earnestness of purpose. John
Burroughs’s first essays were written for his
own soul’s welfare—­the results of
his long-continued mental struggles for light upon
the subject. Major J.W. Powell, the organizer
and director for many years of the United States Geological
Survey and Bureau of American Ethnology, was brought
up by a father and mother whose intense longing was
that their son should be a Methodist preacher.
The growing youth wished to please his parents, but
was also compelled to satisfy his own conscience.
The more he studied the creeds and doctrines of Methodism,
the less he felt he could accept them, and much to
the regret of his parents, he refused to enter the
ministry. Yet, in relating the story to me, he
asserted that his whole life had been one long agony
of earnest study to find the highest truth. Taking
me into his library, where there were several extended

Page 70

shelves filled from end to end with the ponderous tomes
of the two great government bureaus that he controlled,
he said: “Most people regard this as my
life-work, and outwardly it is. Yet I say to you
in all sincerity that the real, inner, secret force
working through all this, has been that I might satisfy
my own soul on the subject of religion.”
Then, picking up two small volumes, he said: “In
these two books I have recorded the results of my
years of agonizing struggle. I don’t suppose
ten men have ever read them through, or, perhaps,
ever will, but these are the real story of the chief
work of my inner life.”

I am one of the few men who have read both these books
with scrupulous care, and yet were it not for what
my friend told me of their profound significance to
him, I should scarcely have been interested enough
in their contents to read them through. At the
same time, I know that the men who, from the
standpoint of their professionally religious complacency
would have condemned Major Powell, never spent one-thousandth
part the time, nor felt one ten-thousandth the real
solicitude that he did about seeking “the way,
the truth, and the life.”

Another friend in Chicago was Dr. M.H. Lackersteen,
openly denounced as an agnostic, and even as an infidel,
by some zealous sectaries. Yet Dr. Lackersteen
had personally translated the whole of the Greek Testament,
and several other sacred books of the Hebrews and Hindoos,
in his intense desire to satisfy the demands of his
own soul for the Truth. He was the soul of honor,
the very personification of sincerity, and as much
above some of his critics—­whom I well knew—­in
these virtues, as they were above the scum of the slums.

The longer I live and study men the more I am compelled
to believe that religion is a personal matter between
oneself and God and is more of the spirit than most
people have yet conceived. It is well known to
those who have read my books and heard my lectures
on the Old Franciscan Missions of California, that
I revere the memory of Padres Junipero Serra, Palou,
Crespi, Catala, Peyri, and others of the founders
of these missions. I have equal veneration for
the goodness of many Catholic priests, nuns, and laymen
of to-day. Yet I am not a Catholic, though zealous
sectaries of Protestantism—­even of the
church to which I am supposed to belong—­sometimes
fiercely assail me for my open commendation of these
men of that faith. They are worried lest
I lean too closely towards Catholicism, and ultimately
become one of that fold. Others, who hear my good
words in favor of what appeals to me as noble and
uplifting in the lives of those of other faiths of
which they do not approve, worry over and condemn my
“breadth” of belief. Indeed, I have
many friends who give themselves an immense lot of
altogether unnecessary worry about this matter.
They have labelled themselves according to some denominational
tag, and accept some form of belief that, to them,

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seems incontrovertible and satisfactory. Many
of them are praying for me, and each that I may see
the TRUTH from his standpoint. For their
prayers I am grateful. I cannot afford to lose
the spirit of love behind and in every one of them.
But for the worry about me in their minds, I
have neither respect, regard, toleration, nor sympathy.
I don’t want it, can do without it, and I resent
its being there. To each and all of them I say
firmly: Quit Your Worrying about my religion,
or want of it. I am in the hands of the same
loving God that you are. I have the promise of
God’s Guiding Spirit as much as you have.
I have listened respectfully and with an earnest and
sincere desire to see and know the Truth, to all you
have said, and now I want to be left alone. I
have come to exclaim with Browning in Rabbi Ben
Ezra:

Now, who shall arbitrate?
Ten men love what I hate,
Shun what I follow, slight
what I receive;
Ten, who in ears and eyes
Match me. We all surmise,
They this thing, and I that: whom
shall my soul believe?

For myself I have concluded that no one shall choose
my religion for me, and all the worrying in the world
shall not change my attitude.

And it is to the worrying of my friends that they
owe this state of mind. For this reason, I found
myself one day counting up the number of people of
different beliefs who had solemnly promised to pray
for me. There were Methodists, Campbellites,
Baptists, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Seventh
Day Adventists, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, Holy Rollers,
and others. Then the query arose: Whose prayers
will be answered on my behalf? Each is sure that
his are the ones that can be effective; yet
their prayers differ; they are, to some degree, antagonistic,
and insofar as they petition that I become one of their
particular fold, they nullify each other, as it is
utterly impossible that I accept the specific form
of faith of each. The consequent result in my
own mind is that as I cannot possibly become what all
these good people desire I should be, as their desires
and prayers for me controvert each other, I must respectfully
decline to be bound by any one of them. I must
and will do my own choosing. Hence all
the worry on my behalf is energy, strength, and effort
wasted.

Let me repeat, then, to the worrier about the salvation
of others: You are in a poor business. Quit
Your Worrying. Hands off! This is none
of your concern. Believe as little or as much
and what you will for your own soul’s salvation,
but do not put forth your conceptions as the
only conceptions possible of Divine Truth before
another soul who may have an immeasurably larger vision
than you have. Oh, the pitiableness of man’s
colossal conceit, the arrogance of his ignorance.
As if the God of the Universe were so small that one
paltry, finite man could contain in his pint measure

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of a mind all the ocean of His power, knowledge, and
love. Let your small and wretched worries go.
Have a little larger faith in the Love of the Infinite
One. Tenderly love and trust those whose welfare
you seek, and trust God at the same time, but don’t
worry when you see the dear ones walking in a path
you have not chosen for them. Remember your own
ignorance, your own frailties, your own errors, your
own mistakes, and then frankly and honestly, fearlessly
and directly ask yourself the question if you dare
to take upon your own ignorant self the responsibility
of seeking to control and guide another living soul
as to his eternal life.

Brother, Sister, the job is too big for you.
It takes God to do that, and you are not yet even
a perfect human being. Hence, while I long for
all spiritual good for my sons and daughters, and for
my friends, and I pray for them, it is in a large
way, without any interjection of my own decisions
and conclusions as to what will be good for them.
I have no fears as I leave them thus in God’s
hand, and regard every worry as sinful on my part,
and injurious to them. I have no desire that
they should accept my particular brand of faith or
belief. While I believe absolutely in that which
I accept for the guidance of my own life, I would
not fetter their souls with my belief if I could.
They are in wiser, better, larger, more loving Hands
than mine. And if I would not thus fetter my
children and friends, I dare not seek to fetter others.
My business is to live my own religion to the utmost.
If I must worry, I will worry about that, though, as
I think my readers are well aware by now, I do not
believe in any kind of worry on any subject whatever.

Hence, let me again affirm in concluding this chapter,
I regard worry about the religion of others as unwarrantable
on account of our own ignorances as to their peculiar
needs, as well as of God’s methods of supplying
those needs. It is also a useless expenditure
of strength, energy, and affection, for, if God leads,
your worry cannot possibly affect the one so led.
It is also generally an irritant to the one worried
over. Even though he may not formulate it into
words he feels that it is an interference with his
own inner life, a nagging that he resents, and, therefore,
it does him far more harm than good; and, finally,
it is an altogether indefensible attempt to saddle
upon another soul your own faith or belief, which may
be altogether unsuitable or inadequate to the needs
of that soul.

There is still one other form of worry connected with
the subject of religion. Many a good man and
woman worries over the apparent well-being and success
of those whom he, she, accounts wicked! They
are seen to flourish as a green bay tree, or as a well-watered
garden, and this seems to be unfair, unjust, and unwise
on the part of the powers that govern the universe.
If good is desirable, people ought to be encouraged
to it by material success—­so reason these
officially good wiseacres, who subconsciously wish
to dictate to God how He should run His world.

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How often we hear the question: “Why is
it the wicked prosper so?” or “He’s
such a bad man and yet everything he does prospers.”
Holy Writ is very clear on this subject. The
sacred writer evidently was well posted on the tendency
of human nature to worry and concern itself about
the affairs of others, hence his injunction:

Fret not thyself because of evil doers.

In other words, it’s none of your business.
And I am inclined to believe that a careful study
of the Bible would reveal to every busybody who worries
over the affairs of others that he himself has enough
to do to attend to himself, and that his worry anyhow
is a ridiculous, absurd, and senseless piece of supererogation,
and rather a proof of human conceit and vanity than
of true concern for the spiritual good of others.

CHAPTER XIV

AMBITION AND WORRY

Some forms of ambition are sure and certain developers
and feeders of worry and fretful distress, and should
be guarded against with jealous care. We hear
a great deal from our physicians of the germs of disease
that seize upon us and infect our whole being, but
not all the disease germs that ever infected a race
are so demoralizing to one’s peace and joy as
are the germs of such deadly mental diseases as those
of envy, malice, covetousness, ambition, and the like.
Ambition, like wine, is a mocker. It is a vain
deluder of men. It takes an elevated position
and beckons to you to rise, that you may be seen and
flattered of men. It does not say: “Gain
strength and power, wisdom and virtue, so that men
will place you upon the pedestal of their veneration,
respect, and love,” but it bids you seize the
“spotlight” and hold it, and no sooner
are you there than it begins to pester you, as with
a hundred thousand hornets, flying around and stinging
you, with doubts and questionings as to whether your
fellows see you in this elevated place, whether they
really discern your worth, your beauty, your shining
qualities; and, furthermore, it quickens your hearing,
and bids you strain to listen to what they say about
you, and as you do so, you are pricked, stabbed, wounded
by their slighting and jeering remarks, their scornful
comments upon your impertinent and impudent arrogance
at daring to take such a place, and their open denial
of your possession of any of the qualities which would
entitle you to so honored a position in the eyes of
men.

Then, too, it must be recalled that, when fired with
the desires of this mocker, ambition, one is inclined,
in his selfish absorption, to be ruthless in his dealings
with others. It is so easy to trample upon others
when a siren is beckoning you to climb higher, and
your ears are eagerly listening to her seductive phrases.
With her song in your ears, you cannot hear the wails
of anguish of others, upon whose rights and life you
trample, the manly rebukes of those you wound, or
the stern remonstrances of those who bid you heed your

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course. Ambition blinds and deafens, and, alas,
calluses the heart, kills comradeship, drives away
friendship in its eager selfishness, and in so doing,
lets in a flood of worries that ever beset its victims.
They may not always be in evidence while there is
the momentary triumph of climbing, but they are there
waiting, ready to teeter the pedestal, whisper of
its unsure and unstable condition, call attention to
those who are digging around its foundations, and
to the fliers in the air, who threaten to hurl down
bombs and completely destroy it.

Phaeton begged that his father, Phoebus Apollo, allow
him to drive the flaming chariot of day through the
heavens, and, in spite of all warnings and cautions,
insisted upon his power and ability. Though instructed
and informed as to the great dangers he evoked, he
seized the reins with delight, stood up in the chariot,
and urged on the snorting steeds to furious speed.
Soon conscious of a lighter load than usual, the steeds
dashed on, tossing the chariot as a ship at sea, and
rushed headlong from the traveled road of the middle
zone. The Great and Little Bear were scorched,
and the Serpent that coils around the North Pole was
warmed to life. Now filled with fear and dread,
Phaeton lost self-control, and looked repentant to
the goal which he could never reach. The unrestrained
steeds dashed hither and thither among the stars,
and reaching the Earth, set fire to trees, cities,
harvests, mountains. The air became hot and lurid.
The rivers, springs, and snowbanks were dried up.
The Earth then cried out in her agony to Jupiter for
relief, and he launched a thunderbolt at the now cowed
and broken-hearted driver, which not only struck him
from the seat he had dishonored, but also out of existence.

The old mythologists were no fools. They saw
the worries, the dangers, the sure end of ambition.
They wrote their cautions and warnings against it
in this graphic story. Why will men and women,
for the sake of an uncertain and unsure goal, tempt
the Fates, and, at the same time, surely bring upon
themselves a thousand unnecessary worries that sting,
nag, taunt, fret, and distress? Far better seek
a goal of certainty, a harbor of sureness, in the
doing of kindly deeds, noble actions, unselfish devotion
to the uplift of others. In this mad rush of
ambitious selfishness, such a life aim may seem
chimerical, yet it is the only aim that will reach,
attain, endure. For all earthly fame, ambitious
attainment, honor, glory is evanescent and temporary.
Like the wealth of the miser, it must be left behind.
There is no pocket in any shroud yet devised which
will convey wealth across the River of Death, and
no man’s honors and fame but that fade in the
clear light of the Spirit that shines in the land beyond.

Then, ambitious friend, quit your worrying, readjust
your aim, trim your lamp for another and better guest,
live for the uplift of others, seek to give help and
strength to the needy, bring sunshine to the darkened,
give of your abundance of spirit and exuberance to
those who have little or none, and thus will you lay
up treasure within your own soul which will convert
hell into heaven, and give you joy forever.

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So long as men and women believe that happiness lies
in outdistancing, surpassing their fellows in exterior
or material things, they cannot help but be subjects
to worry. To determine to gain a larger fortune
than that possessed by another man is a sure invitation
to worry to enter into possession of one’s soul.
Who has not seen the vain struggles, the distress,
the worry of unsatisfied ambitions that would have
amounted to nothing had they been gratified? In
Women’s Clubs—­as well as men’s—­many
a heart-ache is caused because some other woman gains
an office, is elected to a position, is appointed on
a committee you had coveted.

The remedy for this kind of worry is to change the
aim of life. Instead of making position, fame,
the attainment of fortune, office, a fine house, an
automobile, the object of existence, make the doing
of something worthy a noble manhood or womanhood the
object of your ambition. Strive to make yourself
worthy to be the best president your club has
ever had; endeavor to be the finest equipped, mentally,
for the work that is to be done, whether you are
chosen to do it or not, and keep on, and on, and
still on, finding your joy in the work, in the benefit
it is to yourself, in the power it is storing up within
you.

Then, as sure as the sun shines, the time will come
when you will be chosen to do the needed work.
“Your own will come to you.” Nothing
can hinder it. It will flow as certainly into
your hands as the waters of the river flow into the
sea.

CHAPTER XV

ENVY AND WORRY

Envy is a prolific source of worry. Once allow
this demon of unrest to fasten itself in one’s
vitals, and worry claims every waking hour. Envy
is that peculiar demon of discontent that cannot see
the abilities, attainments, achievements, or possessions
of another without malicious determination to belittle,
deride, make light of, or absolutely deny their existence,
while all the time covetously craving them for itself.
Andrew Tooke pictures Envy as a vile female:

A deadly paleness in her cheek was seen;
Her meager skeleton scarce cased with
skin;
Her looks awry; an everlasting scowl
Sits on her brow; her teeth deform’d
and foul;
Her breast had gall more than her breast
could hold;
Beneath her tongue coats of poison roll’d;
No smile e’er smooth’d her
furrow’d brow but those
Which rose from laughing at another’s
woes;
Her eyes were strangers to the sweets
of sleep,
Devouring spite for ever waking keep;
She sees bless’d men with vast success
crown’d,
Their joys distract her, and their glories
wound;
She kills abroad, herself’s consum’d
at home,
And her own crimes are her perpetual martyrdom.

Ever watching, with bloodshot eyes, the good things
of others, she hates them for their possessions, longs
to possess them herself, lets her covetousness gnaw
hourly at her very vitals, and yet, in conversation
with others, slays with slander, vile innuendo, and
falsehood, the reputation of those whose virtues she
covets.

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As Robert Pollock wrote of one full of envy:

It was his earnest work and daily
toil
With lying tongue, to make the noble seem
Mean as himself.

* * * *
*

Whene’er he heard,
As oft he did, of joy and happiness,
And great prosperity, and rising worth,
’Twas like a wave of wormwood o’er his
soul
Rolling its bitterness.

Aye! and he drank in great draughts of this bitter
flood, holding it in his mouth, tasting its foul and
biting qualities until his whole being seemed saturated
with it, hating it, dreading it, suffering every moment
while doing it, yet enduring it, because of his envy
at the good of others.

Few there are, who, at some time or other in their
lives, do not have a taste, at least, of the stinging
bite of envy. Girls are envious of each other’s
good looks, clothes, possessions, houses, friends;
boys of the strength, skill, ability, popularity of
others; women of other women, men of other men, just
as when they were boys and girls.

One of the strongest words the great Socrates ever
wrote was against envy. He said:

Envy is the daughter of pride, the author
of murder and revenge, the beginner of secret
sedition, the perpetual tormentor of virtue.
Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom,
a poison, a quicksilver, which consumeth the flesh,
and drieth up the marrow of the bones.

And history clearly shows that the wise philosopher
stated facts. Caligula slew his brother because
he possessed a beauty that led him to be more esteemed
and favored than he. Dionysius, the tyrant, was
vindictive and cruel to Philoxenius, the musician,
because he could sing; and with Plato, the philosopher,
because he could dispute, better than himself.
Even the great Cambyses slew his brother, Smerdis,
because he was a stronger and better bowman than himself
or any of his party. It was envy that led the
courtiers of Spain to crave and seek the destruction
of Columbus, and envy that set a score of enemies
at the heels of Cortes, the conqueror of Peru.

It is a fearful and vindictive devil, is this devil
of envy, and he who yields to it, who once allows
it admittance to the citadel of his heart, will soon
learn that every subsequent waking and even sleeping
moment is one of worry and distress.

CHAPTER XVI

DISCONTENT AND WORRY

Closely allied to envy is discontent. These are
blood relations, and both are prolific sources of
worry. And lest there are those who think because
I have revealed, in the preceding chapter, the demon
of worry—­envy—­as one that attacks
the minds of the great and mighty, it does not enter
the hearts of everyday people, let me quote, entire,
an article and a poem recently written by Ella Wheeler
Wilcox in The Los Angeles Examiner. The
discontent referred to clearly comes from envy.
Some one has blond tresses, while she has black.
This arouses her envy. She is envious because
another’s eyes are blue, while hers are brown;
another is tall, while she is small; etc., etc.
There is nothing, indeed, that she cannot weep and
worry over:

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There is a certain girl I know, a pretty
little elf,
Who spends almost her entire thoughts
in pity for herself.

Her glossy tresses, raven black, cause
her to weep a pond—­
She is so sorry for herself because they
are not blond.

Her eyes, when dry, are very bright and
very brown, ’tis true,
But they are almost always wet, because
they are not blue.

She is of medium height, and when she
sees one quite tall
She weeps all day in keenest pain because
she is so small.

But if she meets some tiny girl whom she
considers fair,
Then that she is so big herself she sobs
in great despair.

When out upon a promenade her tears she
cannot hide,
To think she is obliged to walk while
other folks can ride.

But if she drives, why then she weeps—­it
is so hard to be
Perched stiffly in a carriage seat while
other girls run free.

She used to cry herself quite sick to
think she had to go
Month after month to dreary schools; that
was her constant woe.

But on her graduating day, my, how her
tears did run!
It seemed so sorrowful to know that her
school life was done.

One day she wept because she saw a funeral
train go by—­
It was so sad that she must live while
other folks could die.

And really all her friends will soon join
with her in those tears
Unless she takes a brighter view of life
ere many years.

The conceited girl or woman is tiresome and unpleasant
as a companion, but the morbidly discontented woman
is far worse. Perhaps you have met her, with
her eternal complaint of the injustice of Fate toward
her.

She feels that she is born for better things than
have befallen her; her family does not understand
her; her friends misjudge her; the public slights
her.

If she is married she finds herself superior to her
husband and to her associates. She is eternally
longing for what she has not, and when she gets it
is dissatisfied.

The sorrowful side of life alone appeals to her.

This she believes is due to her “artistic nature.”
The injustice of fortune and the unkindness of society
are topics dear to her heart. She finds her only
rapture in misery.

If she is religiously inclined she looks toward Heaven
with more grim satisfaction in the thought that it
will strip fame, favor and fortune from the unworthy
than because it will give her the benefits she feels
she deserves.

She does not dream that she is losing years of Heaven
here upon earth by her own mental attitude.

WE BUILD OUR HEAVENS THOUGHT BY THOUGHT.

If you are dwelling upon the dark phases of your destiny
and upon the ungracious acts of Fate, you are shaping
more of the same experience for yourself here and
in realms beyond.

You are making happiness impossible for yourself upon
any plane. In your own self lies Destiny.

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I have known a woman to keep her entire family despondent
for years by her continual assertions that she was
out of her sphere, misunderstood and unappreciated.

The minds of sensitive children accepted these statements
and grieved over “Poor Mother’s”
sad life until their own youth was embittered.
The morbid mother seized upon the sympathies of her
children like a leech and sapped their young lives
of joy.

The husband grew discouraged and indifferent under
the continual strain, and what might have been a happy
home was a desolate one, and its memory is a nightmare
to the children to-day.

Understand yourself and your
Divine possibilities and you will
cease to think you are misunderstood.

It is not possible to misunderstand
a beautiful, sunny day.
All nature rejoices in its
loveliness.

Give love, cheerfulness, kindness
and good-will to all
humanity, and you need not
worry about being misunderstood.

Give the best you have to
each object, purpose and individual,
and you will eventually receive
the best from humanity.

CHAPTER XVII

COWARDICE AND WORRY

Cowardice is a much more prolific source of worry
than most people imagine. There are many varieties
of cowardice, all tracing their ancestry back to fear.
Fear truly makes cowards of us all. There are
the physical cowards, the social cowards, the business
cowards, the hang-on-to-your-job cowards, the political
cowards, the moral cowards, the religious cowards,
and fifty-seven, nay, a hundred and one other varieties.
Each and all of these have their own attendant demons
of worry. Every barking dog becomes a lion ready
to tear one to pieces, and no bridge is strong enough
to allow us to pass over in safety. No cloud
has a silver lining, and every rain-storm is sure to
work injury to the crops rather than bring the needful
moisture for their vivification.

What a piteous sight to see a man who dares not express
his honest opinions, who must crawl instead of walk
upright, in the presence of his employer, lest he
lose his job. How his cowardice worries him,
meets him at every turn, torments him, lest some incautious
word be repeated, lest he say or do the wrong thing.
And so long as there are cowards to employ, bully
employers will exist. Nay, the cowardice seems
to call out bullying qualities. Just as a cur
will follow you with barkings and threatening growls
if you run from him, and yet turn tail and run when
you boldly face him, so with most men, with society,
with the world—­flee from them, show your
fear of them, and they will harry you, but boldly
face them, they gentle down immediately, fawn upon
you, lie down, or, to use an expressive slang phrase,
“come and eat out of your hand.”

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How politicians straddle the fence, refrain from expressing
their opinions, deal in glittering generalities, because
of their cowardly fears. How they turn their
sails to catch every breath of popular favor.
How cautious, politic, wary, they are, and how fears
worry and besiege them, whenever they accidentally
or incidentally say something that can be interpreted
as a positive conviction. And yet men really
love a brave man in political life; one who has definite
convictions and fearlessly states them; who has no
worries as to results but dares to say and do those
things only of which his conscience approves.
No matter how one may regard Roosevelt, cowardice
is one thing none will accuse him of. He says
his say, does his will, expresses himself with freedom
upon any and all subjects, let results be as they may.
Such a man is free from the petty worries that beset
most politicians. He knows nothing of their existence.
They cannot breathe in the free atmosphere that is
essential to his life; like the cowardly cur, they
run away at his approach.

Oh, cowards all, of every kind and degree, quit ye
like men, be strong and of good courage, dare and
do, dare and say, dare and be, take a manly stand,
fling out your banner boldly to the breeze, cry out
as did Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty,
or give me death,” or as that other patriot
did: “Sink or swim, survive or perish, I
give my hand and my heart to this vote.”
Do the things you are afraid of; dare the men who
make cowards of you; say the things you fear to say;
and be the things you know you ought to be, and it
will surprise you how the petty devils of worry will
slink away from you. You will walk in new life,
in new strength, in new joy, in new freedom. For
he who lives a life free from worries of this nature,
has a spontaneity, a freedom, an exuberance, an enthusiasm,
a boldness, that not only are winsome in themselves,
make friends, open the doors of opportunity, attract
the moving elements of life, but that give to their
possessor an entirely new outlook, a wider survey,
a more comprehensive grasp. Life itself becomes
bigger, grander, more majestic, more worth while, the
whole horizon expands, and from being a creature of
petty affairs, dabbling in a small way in the stuff
of which events are made, he becomes a potent factor,
a man, a creator, a god, though in the germ.

CHAPTER XVIII

WORRY ABOUT MANNERS AND SPEECH

Many people are desperately worried about their manners.
One has but to read the letters written to the “Answers
to Correspondents” departments of the newspapers
to see how much worry this subject of manners causes.
This springs, undoubtedly, from a variety of causes.
People brought up in the country, removing to the city,
find the conditions of life very different from those
to which they have been accustomed, and they are uncertain
as to what city people regard as the right and proper

Page 80

things to do. Where one, perforce, must act,
uncertainty is always irritating or worrying, and,
because of this uncertainty, many people worry even
before the time comes to act. Now, if their worry
would take a practical and useful turn—­or,
perhaps, I had better state it in another way, viz.,
that if they would spend the same time in deciding
what their course of action should be—­there
would be an end put to the worry.

We have all seen such people. They are worried
lest their clothes are not all right for the occasion,
lest their tie is of the wrong shade, their shoes
of the correct style, and a thousand and one things
that they seem to conjure up for the especial purpose
of worrying over them. Who has not seen the nervousness,
the worried expression on the face, the real misery
of such people, caused by trifles that are so insignificant
as not to be worth one-tenth the bother wasted on them.

The learning of a few fundamental principles will
help out wonderfully. The chief end of “good
manners” is to oil the wheels of social converse.
Hence, the first and most important principle to learn
is a due and proper consideration for the rights, opinions,
and comfort of others. In other words, don’t
think of yourself so much as of the other fellow.
Let your question be, not: How can I secure my
own pleasure and comfort? but How can I best secure
his? It is a self-evident proposition that you
cannot make him feel comfortable and happy if you
are uncomfortable and unhappy. Hence, the first
thing to do is to quit worrying and be comfortable.
This desired state of mind will come as soon as you
have courageously made up your mind as to what standard
of manners you intend to follow. The world is
made up to-day, largely, of two classes: those
who have money, and those who don’t. Of
the former class, a certain few set themselves up as
the arbiters of good manners; they decide what shall
be called “good form,” and what is not
allowable. If you belong to that class, the best
thing you can do is to learn “to play the game
their way.” Study their rules of calling
cards, and learn whether you leave one, two, three,
or six when you are calling upon a man, or a woman,
or both, or their oldest unmarried daughter, or the
rest of the family. This is a regular game like
golf, or polo. You have to know the course, the
tools to use, and the method of going from one goal
to another. Now, I never knew any ordinarily
intelligent man or woman who couldn’t learn
the names of the tools used in golf, the numbers of
the holes, and the rules of the game. How you
play the game is another matter. And so is it
in “good society.” You can learn the
rules as easily as the next one, and then it is “up
to you” as to how you play it. You’ll
have to study the fashions in clothes; the fashions
in handkerchiefs, and how to flirt with them; when
to drink tea, and where; how to lose money gracefully
at bridge; how to gabble incessantly and not know

Page 81

what you are talking about; how to listen “intelligently”
and not have the remotest idea what your vis-a-vis
is saying to you; you’ll have to join ’steen
clubs, and read ten new novels a day; go to every new
play; know all about the latest movies; know all the
latest ideas of social uplift, study art, the spiritual
essence of color, the futurists, and the cubists.
Of course, you’ll study the peerage of England
and know all about rank and precedence—­and,
indeed, you’ll have your hands and mind so full
of things that will make such a hash of life that
it will take ten specialists to straighten you out
and help you to die forty years before your time.
Hence, if that is the life you intend to live, throw
this book into the fire. It will be wasting your
time to read it.

If you don’t belong to the class of the extra
rich, but are all the time wishing that you did; that
you had their money, could live as they live, and,
as far as you can, you imitate, copy, and follow them,
then, again, I recommend that you give this book to
the nearest newsboy and let him sell it and get some
good out of it. You are not yet ready for it,
or else you have gone so far beyond me in life, that
you are out of my reach.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the class of
workers, those who have to earn their living
and wish to spend their lives intelligently and usefully,
you can well afford to disregard—­after you
have learned to apply the few basic principles of
social converse—­the whims, the caprices,
the artificial code set up by the so-called arbiters
of fashion, manners, and “good form,”
which are not formulated for the promotion of intelligent
intercourse between real manhood and womanhood, but
for the preservation and strengthening of the barriers
of wealth and caste.

Connected with this phase of the subject is a consideration
of those who are worried lest in word or action, they
fail in gentility. They are afraid to do anything
lest it should not be regarded as genteel. When
they shake hands, it must be done not so much with
hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility,
and you wonder what that faint touch of fingers, reached
high in air, means. They would be mortified beyond
measure if they failed to observe any of the little
gentilities of life, while the larger consideration
of their visitor’s disregard of the matter,
would entirely escape them. To such people, social
intercourse is a perpetual worry and bugbear.
They are on the watch every moment, and if a visitor
fails to say, “Pardon me,” at the proper
place, or stands with his back to his hostess for a
moment, or does any other of the things that natural
men and women often do, they are “shocked.”

Then it would be amusing, were it not pathetic, to
see how particular they are about their speech—­what
they say, and how they say it. As Dr.
Palmer has tersely said: “We are terrorized
by custom, and inclined to adjust what we would say
to what others have said before,” and he might
have added: It must be said in the same manner.

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I cannot help asking why men and women should be terrorized
by custom—­the method followed or prescribed
by other men and women. Why be so afraid of others;
why so anxious to “kow-tow” to the standards
of others? Who are they? What are they, that
they should demand the reverent following of the world?
Have you anything to say? Have you a right to
say it? Is it wise to say it? Then, in the
name of God, of manhood, of common sense, say it,
directly, positively, assertively, as is your right,
remembering the assurance of the Declaration of Independence
that “all men are created equal.”
Don’t worry about whether you are saying it
in the genteel fashion of some one else’s standard.
Make your own standard. Even the standards of
the grammar books and dictionaries are not equal to
that of a man who has something to say and says it
forcefully, truthfully, pointedly, directly.
Dr. Palmer has a few words to say on this phase of
the subject, which are well worthy serious consideration:
“The cure for the first of these troubles is
to keep our eyes on our object, instead of on our
listener or ourselves; and for the second, to learn
to rate the expressiveness of language more highly
than its compeers. The opposite of this, the
disposition to set correctness above expressiveness,
produces that peculiarly vulgar diction, known as
“school-ma’am English,” in which
for the sake of a dull accord with usage, all the
picturesque, imaginative, and forceful employment of
words is sacrificed.”

There you have it! If you have something to say
that really means something, think of that, rather
than of the way of saying it, your hearer, or yourself.
Thus you will lose your self-consciousness, your dread,
your fear, your worry. If your thought is worth
anything, you can afford to laugh at some small violation
of grammar, or the knocking over of some finical standard
or other. Not that I would be thought to advocate
either carelessness, laziness, or indifference in
speech. Quite the contrary, as all who have heard
me speak well know. But I fully believe that
thought is of greater importance than form
of expression. And, as for grammar, I believe
with Thomas Jefferson, that “whenever, by small
grammatical negligences, the energy of your ideas
can be condensed or a word be made to stand for a sentence,
I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.”

I was present once when Thomas Carlyle and a technical
grammarian were talking over some violation of correct
speech—­according to the latter’s
standard—­when Carlyle suddenly burst forth
in effect, in his rich Scotch burr: “Why,
mon, I’d have ye ken that I’m one of the
men that make the language for little puppies like
ye to paw over with your little, fiddling, twiddling
grammars!”

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By all means, know all the grammar you can. Read
the best of poets and prose authors to see how they
have mastered the language, but don’t allow
your life to become a burden to you and others because
of your worry lest you “slip a grammatical cog”
here and there, when you know you have something worth
saying. And if you haven’t anything worth
saying, please, please, keep your mouth shut, no matter
what the genteel books prescribe, for nothing can
justify the talk of an empty-headed fool who will
insist upon talking when he and his listeners know
he has nothing whatever to say. So, if you must
worry, let it be about something worth while—­getting
hold of ideas, the strength of your thought, the power
of your emotion, the irresistible sweep of your enthusiasm,
the forcefulness of your indignation about wrong.
These are things it is worth while to set your mind
upon, and when you have decided what you ought to
say, and are absorbed with the power of its thought,
the need the world has for it, you will care little
about the exact form of your words. Like the flood
of a mighty stream, they will pour forth, carrying
conviction with them, and to convince your hearer
of some powerful truth is an object worthy the highest
endeavor of a godlike man or woman—­surely
a far different object than worrying as to whether
the words or method of expression meet some absurd
standard of what is conceived to be “gentility.”

Congressman Hobson, of Merrimac fame, and Ex-President
Roosevelt are both wonderful illustrations of the
point I am endeavoring to impress upon my readers.
I heard Hobson when, in Philadelphia, at a public
dinner given in his honor, he made his first speech
after his return from Cuba. It was evident that
he had been, and was, much worried about what he should
say, and the result was everybody else was worried
as he tried to say it. His address was a pitiable
failure, mainly because he had little or nothing to
say, and yet tried to make a speech. Later he
entered Congress, began to feel intensely upon the
subjects of national defense and prohibition of the
alcoholic liquor traffic. A year or so ago I
heard him speak on the latter of these subjects.
Here, now, was an entirely different man. He was
possesed with a great idea. He was no longer
trying to find something to say, but in a powerful,
earnest, and enthusiastic way, he poured forth facts,
figures, argument, and illustration, that could not
fail to convince an open mind, and profoundly impress
even the prejudiced.

It was the same with Roosevelt. When he first
began to speak in public, it was hard work. He
wrote his addresses beforehand, and then read them.
Perhaps he does now, for aught I know to the contrary,
but I do know that now that he is full of the subjects
of national honor in dealing with such cases as Mexico,
Belgium, and Armenia, and our preparedness to sacrifice
life itself rather than honor, his words pour forth
in a perfect Niagara of strong, robust, manly argument,
protest, and remonstrance, which gives one food for
deep thought no matter how much he may differ.

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There are those who worry about the “gentility”
of others. I remember when Charles Wagner, the
author of The Simple Life, was in this country.
We were dining at the home of a friend and one of these
super-sensitive, finical sticklers for gentility was
present. Wagner was speaking in his big, these
super-sensitive, finical sticklers for gentility simple,
primitive way of a man brought up as a peasant, and
more concerned about what he was thinking than whether
his “table manners” conformed to the latest
standard. There was some gravy on his plate.
He wanted it. He took a piece of bread and used
it as a sop, and then, impaling the gravy-soaked bread
on his fork, he conveyed it to his mouth with gusto
and relish. My “genteel” friend commented
upon it afterwards as “disgusting,” and
lost all interest in the man and his work as a consequence.

To my mind, the criticism was that of a fool.

John Muir, the eminent poet-naturalist of the Mountains
of California, had a habit at the table of “crumming”
his bread—­that is, toying with it, until
it crumbled to pieces in his hand. He would,
at the same time, be sending out a steady stream of
the most entertaining, interesting, fascinating, and
instructive lore about birds and beasts, trees and
flowers, glaciers and rocks, that one ever listened
to. In his mental occupancy, he knew not whether
he was eating his soup with a fork or an ice-cream
spoon—­and cares less. Neither did
any one else with brains and an awakened mind that
soared above mere conventional manners. And yet
I once had an Eastern woman of great wealth, (recently
acquired), and of great pretensions to social “manners,”
at whose table Muir had eaten, inform me that she
regarded him as a rude boor, because, forsooth, he
was unmindful of these trivial and unimportant conventions
when engaged in conversation.

Now, neither Wagner nor Muir would justify any advocacy
on my part of neglect of true consideration, courtesy,
or good manners. But where is the “lack
of breeding” in sopping up gravy with a piece
of bread or “crumming,” or eating soup
with a spoon of one shape or another? These are
purely arbitrary rules, laid down by people who have
more time than sense, money than brains, and who,
as I have elsewhere remarked, are far more anxious
to preserve the barand unimportant conventions when
engaged in conive realization of the biblical idea
of the “brotherhood of man.”

CHAPTER XIX

THE WORRIES OF JEALOUSY

A prolific source of worry is jealousy; not only the
jealousy that exists between men and women, but that
exists between women and women, and between men and
men. There are a thousand forms that this hideous
monster of evil assumes, and when they have been catalogued
and classified, another thousand will be found awaiting,
around the corner, of entirely different categories.
But all alike they have one definite origin, one source,

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one cause. And that cause, I am convinced, is
selfishness. We wish to own, to dominate, to control,
absolutely, entirely, for our own pleasure, and satisfaction,
that of which we are jealous. In Chapter One
I tell the incident of the young man on the street
car whose jealous worry was so manifest when he saw
his “girl” smiling upon another man.
I suppose most men and women feel, or have felt, at
some time or other, this sex jealousy. That woman
belongs to me, her smiles are mine, her
pleasant words should fall on my ear alone;
I am her lover, she, the mistress of my
heart; and that should content her.

Every writer of the human heart has expatiated upon
this great source of worry—­jealousy.
Shakspere refers to it again and again. The whole
play of Othello rests upon the Moor’s
jealousy of his fair, sweet, and loyally faithful
Desdemona. How the fiendish Iago plays upon Othello’s
jealous heart until one sees that:

Trifles, light as air,
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.

Iago bitterly resents a slight he feels Othello has
put upon him. With his large, generous, unsuspicious
nature, Othello never dreams of such a thing; he trusts
Iago as his intimate friend, and thus gives the crafty
fiend the oportunity he desires to

put
the Moor
Into a jealousy so strong
That judgment cannot cure ...
Make the Moor thank me, love me, reward
me,
For making him egregiously an ass
And practicing upon his peace and quiet
Even to madness.

Othello gives his wife, Desdemona, a rare handkerchief.
Iago urges his own wife, who is Desdemona’s
maid, to pilfer this and bring it to him. When
he gets it, he leaves it in Cassio’s room.
Cassio was an intimate friend of Othello’s,
one, indeed, who had gone with him when he went to
woo Desdemona, and who, by Iago’s machinations,
had been suspended from his office of Othello’s
chief lieutenant. To provoke Othello’s
jealousy Iago now urges Desdemona to plead Cassio’s
cause with her husband, and at the came time eggs
on Othello to watch Cassio:

Look to your wife; observe her well with
Cassio;
Wear your eye thus, not jealous nor secure.
I would not have your free and noble nature
Out of self-bounty be abus’d; look to ’t.

Thus he works Othello up to a rage, and yet all the
time pretends to be holding him back:

I
do see you’re mov’d;
I pray you not to strain my speech
To grosser issues nor to larger reach
Than to suspicion.

Iago leaves the handkerchief in Cassio’s room,
at the same time saying:

The Moor already changes with my poison;
Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons,
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste,
But with a little act upon the blood,
Burn like the mines of sulphur.

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And as he sees the tortures the jealous worries of
the Moor have already produced in him, he exultingly
yet stealthily rejoices:

Not
poppy, nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou hadst yesterday.

Well might Othello exclaim that he is “Set on
the rack.” Each new suspicion is a fresh
pull of the lever, a tightening of the strain to breaking
point, and soon his jealousy turns to the fierce and
murderous anger Iago hoped it would:

Like
to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps
due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent
pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er
ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.

Thus was he urged on, worried by his jealousy, until,
in his bloody rage, he slew his faithful wife.
Poor Desdemona, we weep her fate, yet at the same
time we should deeply lament that Othello was so beguiled
and seduced by his jealousy to so horrible a deed.
And few men or women there are, unless their souls
are purified by the wisdom of God, that are not liable
to jealous influences. Our human nature is weak
and full of subtle treacheries, that, like Iago, seduce
us to our own undoing. He who yields for one
moment to the worries of jealousy is already on the
downward path that leads to misery, woe and deep undoing,
Iago is made to declare the philosophy of this fact,
when, in the early portion of the play he says to
Roderigo:

’Tis in ourselves we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the
which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will
plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract
it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness
or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible
authority of this lies in our wills.

Therein, surely, is great truth. We can plant
or weed up, in the garden of our minds, whatever we
will; we can “have it sterile with idleness,”
or fertilize it with industry, and it must ever be
remembered that the more fertile the soil the more
evil weeds will grow apace if we water and tend them.
Our jealous worries are the poisonous weeds of life’s
garden and should be rooted out instanter, and kept
out, until not a sign of them can again be found.

Solomon sang that “jealousy is as cruel as the
grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which
hath a most vehement flame.”

What a graphic picture of worry—­a fire
of vehement flame, burning, scorching, destroying
peace, happiness, content, joy and reducing them to
ashes.

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In my travel and observation I have found a vast amount
of jealous worry in institutions of one kind and another—­such
as the Indian Service, in reform schools, in humane
societies, in hospitals, among the nurses, etc.
It seems to be one of the misfortunes of weak human
nature when men and women associate themselves together
to do some work which ought to call out all the nobleness,
the magnanimity, the godlike qualities of their souls,
they become maggoty with jealous worries—­worry
that they are not accorded the honor that is their
due; worry that their work is not properly appreciated;
worry lest someone else becomes a favorite of the
Superintendent, etc., etc., etc., ad
libitum. Worries of this nature in every case,
are a proof of small, or undeveloped, natures.
No truly great man or woman can be jealous. Jealousy
implies that you are not sure of your own worth, ability,
power. You find someone else is being appreciated,
you covet that appreciation for yourself, whether
you deserve it or not. In other words you yield
to accursed selfishness, utterly forgetful of the
apostolic injunction: “In honor preferring
one another.”

And the same jealousies are found among men and women
in every walk of life, in trade, in the office, among
professors in schools, colleges, universities; in
the learned professions, among lawyers, physicians
and even among the ministers of the gospel, and judges
upon the bench.

Oh! shame! shame! upon the littleness, the meanness,
the paltriness of such jealousies; of the worries
that come from them. How any human being is to
be pitied whose mortal mind is corroded with the biting
acid of jealous worry. When I see those who are
full of worry because yielding to this demon of jealousy
I am almost inclined to believe in the old-time Presbyterian
doctrine of “total depravity.” Whenever,
where-ever, you find yourself feeling jealous, take
yourself by the throat (figuratively), and strangle
the feeling, then go and frankly congratulate the
person of whom you are jealous upon some good you can
truthfully say you see in him; spread his praises abroad;
seek to do him honor. Thus by active work against
your own paltry emotion you will soon overcome it
and be free from its damning and damnable worries.

Akin to the worries of jealousy are the worries of
hate. How much worry hate causes the hater, he
alone can tell. He spends hours in conjuring
up more reasons for his hate than he would care to
write down. Every success of the hated is another
stimulant to worry, and each step forward is a sting
full of pain and bitterness.

He who hates walks along the path of worry, and so
long as he hates he must worry. Hence, there
is but one practical way of escape from the worries
of hatred, viz., by ceasing to hate, by overcoming
evil with good.

CHAPTER XX

THE WORRIES OF SUSPICION

Page 88

He who has a suspicious mind is ever the prey of worry.
Such an one is to be pitied for he is tossed hither
and yon, to and fro, at the whim of every breath of
suspicion he breathes. He has no real peace of
mind, no content, no unalloyed joy, for even in his
hours of pleasure, of recreation, of expected jollity
he is worrying lest someone is trying to get ahead
of him, his vis-a-vis is “jollying”
him, his partner at golf is trying to steal a march
on him, he is not being properly served at the picnic,
etc.

These suspicious-minded people are sure that every
man is a scoundrel at heart—­more or less—­and
needs to be watched; no man or woman is to be trusted;
every grocer will sand his sugar, chicory his coffee,
sell butterine for butter, and cold-storage eggs for
fresh if he gets a chance. To accept the word
of a stranger is absurd, as it is also to believe
in the disinterestedness of a politician, reformer,
office-holder, a corporation, or a rich man. But
to believe evil, to expect to be swindled, or prepare
to be deceived is the height of perspicacity and wisdom.
How wonderfully Shakspere in Othello portrays
the wretchedness of the suspicious man. One reason
why Iago so hated the Moor was that he suspected him:

the
thoughts whereof
Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my
inwards,
And nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am even’d with him.

How graphic the simile, “gnaw my inwards;”
it is the perpetual symbol of worry; the poisonous
mineral ever biting away the lining of the stomach;
just as mice and rats gnaw at the backs of the most
precious books and destroy them; aye, as they gnaw
during the night-time and drive sleep away from the
weary, so does suspicion gnaw with its sharp worrying
teeth to the destruction of peace, happiness and joy.

Then, when Iago has poisoned Othello’s mind
with suspicions about his wife, how the Moor is worried,
gnawed by them:

By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monster in his thought
Too hideous to be shown—­(To
Iago) Thou dost mean something.
I heard thee say even now, thou lik’dst
not that,
When Cassio left my wife; what didst not
like?
And when I told thee he was of my counsel
In my whole course of wooing, thou criedst
‘Indeed!’
And didst contract and purse thy brow
together,
As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain
Some horrible conceit. If thou dost
love me,
Show me thy thought.

And then we know, how, with crafty, devilish cunning,
Iago plays upon these suspicions, fans their spark
into flames. He pretends to be doing it purely
on Othello’s account and accuses himself that:

it is my nature’s
plague
To spy into abuses, and yet my jealousy
Shapes faults that are not:

and then cries out:

O
beware, my lord, of jealousy!

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in
bliss
Who certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

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There, indeed, the woe of the suspicious is shown.
His minutes are really “damned;” peace
flies his heart, rest from his couch, sanity from
his throne, and, yielding himself, he becomes
filled with murderous anger and imperils his salvation
here and hereafter.

CHAPTER XXI

THE WORRIES OF IMPATIENCE

How many of our worries come from impatience?
We do not want to wait until the fruition of our endeavors
comes naturally, until the time is ripe, until we
are ready for that which we desire. We wish to
overrule conditions which are beyond our power; we
fail to accept the inevitable with a good grace; we
refuse to believe in our circumscriptions, our limitations,
and in our arrogance and pride express our anger,
our indignation, our impatience.

I have seen people whose auto has broken down, worried
fearfully because they would not arrive somewhere
as they planned, and in their impatient fretfulness
they annoyed, angered, and upset all around them,
without, in one single degree, improving their own
condition or hastening the repair of the disaster.
What folly; what more than childish foolishness.

A child may be excused for its impatience and petulance
for it has not yet learned the inevitable facts of
life—­such as that breaks must be repaired,
tires must be made so that they will not leak, and
that the gasoline tank cannot be empty if the machine
is to run. But a man, a woman, is supposed to
have learned these incontrovertible facts, and should,
at the same time, have learned acquiesence in them.

A train is delayed; one has an important engagement;
worry seems inevitable and excusable. But is
it? Where is the use? Will it replace the
destroyed bridge, renew the washed out track, repair
the broken engine? How much better to submit
to the inevitable with graceful acceptance of the
fact, than to fret, stew, worry, and at the same time,
irritate everyone around you.

How serenely Nature rebukes the impatience of the
fretful worrier. A man plants corn, wheat, barley,
potatoes—­or trees, that take five, seven
years to come to bearing, such as the orange, olive,
walnut, date, etc. Let him fret ever so
much, worry all he likes, chafe and fret every hour;
let him go and dig up his seeds or plants to urge
their upgrowing; let him even swear in his impatient
worry and threaten to smash all his machinery, discharge
his men, and turn his stock loose; Nature goes on
her way, quietly, unmoved, serenely, unhurried, undisturbed
by the folly of the one creature of earth who is so
senseless as to worry—­viz., man.

Many a man’s hair has turned gray, and many
a woman’s brow and cheeks have become furrowed
because of fretful, impatient worry over something
that could not be changed, or hastened, or improved.

My conception of life is that manhood, womanhood,
should rise superior to any and all conditions and
circumstances. Whatever happens, Spirit should
be supreme, superior, in control. And until we
learn that lesson, life, so far, has failed.
Inasmuch as we do learn it, life has become a success.

Page 90

CHAPTER XXII

THE WORRIES OF ANTICIPATION

He crosses every bridge before he comes to it, is
a graphic and proverbial rendering of a description
of the man who worries in anticipation. Something,
sure, is going to happen. He is always fearful,
not of what is, but of what is going to be. For
twenty years he has managed to live and pay his rent,
but at the beginning of each month he begins afresh
to worry where “next month’s rent is going
to come from.” He’s collected his
bills fairly well for a business life-time, but if
a debtor fails to send in his check on the very day
he begins to worry and fear lest he fail to receive
it. His wife has given him four children, but
at the coming of the fifth he is sure something extraordinarily
painful and adverse is going to happen.

He sees—­possibly, here, I should say, she
sees—­their son climbing a tree. She
is sure he will fall and break a leg, an arm, or his
neck. Her boy mustn’t ride the horse lest
he fall and injure himself; if he goes to swim he
is surely in danger of being drowned, and she could
never allow him or his sister to row in a boat lest
it be overturned. The child must be watched momentarily,
lest it fall out of the window, search out a sharp
knife, swallow poison, or do some irreparable damage
to the bric-a-brac.

Here let me relate an incident the truth of which
is vouched for, and which clearly illustrates the
difference between the attitude of worry and that
of trust. One day, when Flattich, a pious minister
of the Wurtemberg, was seated in his armchair, one
of his foster children fell out of a second-story
window, right before him, to the pavement below.
He calmly ordered his daughter to go and bring up the
child. On doing so it was found the little one
had sustained no injury. A neighbor, however,
aroused by the noise, came in and reproached Flattich
for his carelessness and inattention. While she
was thus remonstrating, her own child, which she had
brought with her, fell from the bench upon which she
had seated it, and broke its arm. “Do you
see, good woman,” said the minister, “if
you imagine yourself to be the sole guardian of your
child, then you must constantly carry it in your arms.
I commend my children to God; and even though they
then fall, they are safer than were I to devote my
whole time and attention to them.”

Those who anticipate evils for their children too
often seem to bring down upon their loved ones the
very evils they are afraid of. And one of the
greatest lessons of life, and one that brings immeasurable
and uncountable joys when learned, is, that Nature—­the
great Father-Mother of us all—­is kindly
disposed to us. We need not be so alarmed, so
fearful, so anticipatory of evil at her hands.

Page 91

Charles Warren Stoddard used to tell of the great
dread Mark Twain was wont to feel, during the exhaustion
and reaction he felt at the close of each of his lectures,
lest he should become incapable of further writing
and lecturing and therefore become dependent upon his
friends and die a pauper. How wonderfully he
conquered this demon of perpetual worry all those
who know his life are aware; how that, when his publisher
failed he took upon himself a heavy financial burden,
for which he was in no way responsible, went on a
lecture tour around the world and paid every cent
of it, and finally died with his finances in a most
prosperous condition.

The anticipatory worries of others are just as senseless,
foolish and absurd as were those of Mark Twain, and
it is possible for every man to overcome them, even
as did he.

The cloud we anticipate seldom, if ever, comes, and
then, generally, in a different direction from where
we sought it. Time spent on looking for the cloud,
and figuring how much of injury it will do us had
better be utilized in garnering the hay crop, bringing
in the lambs, or hauling warm fodder and bedding for
them.

There is another side, however, to this worrying anticipation
of troubles. The ancient philosophers recognized
it. Lucan wrote: “The very fear of
approaching evil has driven many into peril.”

There are those who believe that the very concentration
of thought upon a possible evil will bring to pass
the peculiar arrangement of circumstances that makes
the evil. Of this belief I am not competent to
speak, but I am fully assured that it is far from helpful
to be contemplating the possibility of evil.
In my own life I have found that worrying over evils
in anticipation has not prevented their coming, and,
on the other hand, that where I have boldly faced the
situation, without fear and its attendant worries,
the evil has fled.

Hence, whether worries in hand, or worries to come,
worries real or worries imaginary, the wise, sane
and practical course is to kill them all and thus
Quit Your Worrying.

CHAPTER XXIII

HOW OUR WORRY AFFECTS OTHERS

If worry affected merely ourselves it would be bad
enough, but we could tolerate it more than we do.
For it is one of the infernal characteristics of worry
that our manifestation of it invariably affects others
as injuriously as it affects ourselves.

An employer who worries his employees never gets the
good work out of them as does the one who has sense
enough to keep them happy, good-natured and contented.
I was lecturing once for a large corporation.
I had two colleagues, who “spelled me”
every hour. For much of the time we had no place
to rest, work or play between our lectures. Our
engagement lasted the better part of a year, and the
result was that, during that period where our reasonable
needs were unprovided for, we all failed to give as

Page 92

good work as we were capable of. We were unnecessarily
worried by inadequate provision and our employers
suffered. Henry Ford, and men of his type have
learned this lesson. Men respond rapidly to those
who do not worry them. Governor Hunt and Warden
Sims, of Arizona, have learned the same fact in dealing
with prisoners of the State Penitentiary. The
less the men are “worried” by unnecessarily
harsh treatment, absurd and cruel restrictions, curtailment
of natural rights, the better they act, the easier
they are liable to reform and make good.

Dr. Musgrove to his Nervous Breakdowns, tells
a story of two commanders which well illustrates this
point:

In a certain war two companies of men
had to march an equal distance in order to meet
at a particular spot. The one arrived in
perfect order, and with few signs of exhaustion, although
the march had been an arduous one. The other company
reached the place utterly done up and disorganised.
It was all a question of leadership; the captain
of the first company had known his way and kept
his men in good order, while the captain of the
second company had never been sure of himself, and
had harassed his subordinates with a constant succession
of orders and counter-orders, until they had hardly
known whether they were on their heads or their
heels. That was why they arrived completely
demoralised.

In war, as in peace, it is not work that kills so
much as worry. A general may make his soldiers
work to the point of exhaustion as Napoleon often
did, yet have their almost adoring worship. But
the general who worries his men gets neither their
good will nor good work.

A worrying mother can keep a whole house in a turmoil,
from father down to the latest baby. The growing
boys and girls soon learn to dread the name of “home,”
and would rather be in school, in the backyard playing,
in the attic, at the neighbors, or in the streets,
anywhere, than within the sound of their mother’s
worrying voice, or frowning countenance. A worrying
husband can drive his wife distracted, and vice versa.
I was dining not long ago with a couple that, from
outward appearance, had everything that heart could
desire to make them happy. They were young, healthy,
had a good income, were both engaged in work
they liked, yet the husband worried the wife constantly
about trifles. If she wished to set the table
in a particular way he worried because she didn’t
do it some other way; if she drove one of their autos
he worried because she didn’t take the other;
and when she wore a spring-day flowery kind of a hat
he worried her because his mother never wore any other
than a black hat. The poor woman was distracted
by the absolute absurdities, frivolities and inconsequentialities
of his worries, yet he didn’t seem to have sense
to see what he was doing. So I gave him a plain
practical talk—­as I had been drawn into
a discussion of the matter without any volition on
my part—­and urged him to quit irritating
his wife so foolishly and so unnecessarily.

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Some teachers worry their pupils until the latter
fail to do the work they are competent to do; and
the want of success of many an ambitious teacher can
often be attributed to his, her, worrying disposition.
Remember, therefore, that when you worry you are making
others unhappy as well as yourself, you are putting
a damper, a blight, upon other lives as well as your
own, you are destroying the efficiency of other workers
as well as your own, you are robbing others of the
joy of life which God intended them freely to possess.
So that for the sake of others, as well as your own,
it becomes an imperative duty that you

QUIT YOUR WORRYING.

CHAPTER XXIV

WORRY VERSUS INDIFFERENCE

The aim and object of all striving in life should
be to grow more human, more humane, less selfish,
more helpful to our fellows. Any system of life
that fails to meet this universal need is predestined
to failure. When, therefore, I urge upon my readers
that they quit their worrying about their husbands
or wives, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends,
the wicked and the good, I do not mean that they are
to harden their hearts and become indifferent to their
welfare. God forbid! No student of the human
heart, of human life, and of the Bible can long ignore
the need of a caution upon these lines. The sacred
writer knew what he was talking about when he spoke
of the human heart as deceitful and desperately wicked.
It is deceitful or it would never blind people as
it does to the inutility, the futility of much of
their goodness. A goodness that is wrapped up
in a napkin, and lies unused for the benefit of others,
rots and becomes a putrid mass of corruption.
It can only remain good by being unselfishly used for
the good of others, and to prove that the human heart
is desperately wicked one needs only to look at the
suffering endured by mankind unnecessarily—­suffering
that organized society ought to prevent and render
impossible.

The parable of the lost sheep was written to give
us this needful lesson. The shepherd, when he
found one of his sheep gone, did not sit down and
wring his hands in foolish and useless worry as to
what would happen to the sheep, the dangers that would
beset it, the thorns, the precipices, the wolves.
Nor did he count over the times he had cautioned the
sheep not to get away from its fellows. Granted
that it was conceited, self-willed, refused to listen
to counsel, disobedient—­the main fact in
the mind of the shepherd was that it was lost, unprotected,
in danger, afraid, cold, hungry, longing for the sheepfold,
the companionship of its fellows and the guardianship
of the shepherd. Hence, he went out eagerly and
sympathetically, and searched until he found it and
brought it back to shelter.

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This, then, should be the spirit of those who have
needed my caution and advice to quit their worrying
about their loved ones and others—­Do not
worry, but do not, under any consideration, become
hard-hearted, careless, or indifferent. Better
by far preserve your interest and the human tenderness
that leads you to the useless and needless expenditure
of energy and sympathy in worry than that you should
let your loved ones suffer without any care, thought,
or endeavor on their behalf. But do not let it
be a sympathy that leads to worry. Let it be
helpful, stimulating, directive, energizing in the
good. Overcome evil with good. Resist evil
and it will flee from you. So long as those you
love are absorbed in the things that in the past have
led you to worry over them, be tender and sympathetic
with them, surround them with your holy and helpful
love.

Jesus was tender and compassionate with all who were
sick or diseased in body or mind. He was never
angry with any, save the proud and self-righteous
Pharisees. He tenderly forgave the adulterous
woman, justified the publican and never lectured or
rebuked those who came to have their bodily and mental
infirmities removed by him. Let us then be tender
with the erring and the sinful, rather than censorious,
and full of rebuke. Is it not the better way to
point out the right—­overcome the evil with
the good, and thus bind our erring loved ones more
firmly to ourselves. Surely our own errors, failures,
weaknesses and sins ought to have taught us this lesson.

In the bedroom of a friend where I recently slept,
was a card on which was illuminated these words, which
bear particularly upon this subject:

The life that has not known and accepted
sorrow is strangely crude and untaught; it can
neither help nor teach, for it has never learned.
The life that has spurned the lesson of sorrow, or
failed to read it aright, is cold and hard. But
the life that has been disciplined by sorrow is
courageous and full of holy and gentle love.

And it is this holy, gentle, and courageous love that
we need to exercise every day towards those who require
it, rather than the worry that frets still more, irritates,
and widens the gulf already existent. So, reader,
don’t worry, but help, sympathetically and lovingly,
and above all, don’t become indifferent, hard-hearted
and selfish.

CHAPTER XXV

WORRIES AND HOBBIES

Though these words are much alike in sound they have
no sympathy one with another. Put them in active
operation and they rush at each other’s throats
far worse than Allies and Germans are now fighting.
They strive for a death grip, and as soon as one gets
hold he hangs on to the end—­if he can.
Yet, as in all conflicts, the right is sure to win
in an equal combat, the right of the hobby is absolutely
certain to win over the wrong of the worry.

Webster defines a hobby as: “A subject
or plan which one is constantly setting off,”
or “a favorite and ever recurring theme of discourse,
thought, or effort,” but the editor of The
Century Dictionary has a better definition, more
in accord with modern thought, viz., “That
which a person persistently pursues or dwells upon
with zeal or delight, as if riding a horse.”

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Are you cursed by the demon of worry? Has he
got a death grip on your throat? Do you want
to be freed from his throttling assaults? If
so, get a hobby, the more mentally occupying the better,
and ride it earnestly, sincerely, furiously.
Let it be what it will, it will far more than pay
in the end, when you find yourself free from the nightmare
of worry that has so relentlessly ridden you for so
long. Collect bugs, old china, Indian baskets,
Indian blankets, pipes, domestic implements, war paraphanalia,
photographs, butterflies; make an herbarium of the
flowers of your State; collect postage stamps, old
books, first editions; go in for extra-illustrating
books; pick up and classify all the stray phrases
you hear—­do anything that will occupy your
mind to the exclusion of worry.

And let me here add a thought—­the more
unselfish you can make your hobby the better it will
be for you. Perhaps I can put it even in a better
way yet: The less your hobby is entered into with
the purely personal purpose of pleasing yourself,
and the more actively you can make it beneficial,
helpful, joy-giving to others, the more potent for
good it will be in aiding you to get rid of your worries.
He who blesses another is thrice blessed, for he not
only blesses himself by the act, but brings upon himself
the blessing of the recipient and of Almighty God,
with the oft-added blessing of those who learn of
the good deed and breathe a prayer of commendation
for him. In San Francisco there is a newspaper
man who writes in a quaint, peculiar, simple, yet
subtle fashion, who signs himself “K.C.B.”
During the Panama-Pacific Exposition one of his hobbies
was to plan to take there all the poor youngsters
of the streets, the newsboys, the little ones in hospitals,
the incurables, the down-and-outers of the work-house
and poor-farm, and finally, the almost forgotten old
men and women of the almshouses.

I saw strong men weep with deep emotion at the procession
of automobiles conveying the happy though generally
silent throngs on one of these occasions, and “K.C.B.”
must have felt the showers of blessings that were
sent in his direction from those who saw and appreciated
his beautiful helpfulness.

There is nothing to hinder any man, woman, youth or
maiden from doing exactly the same kind of thing,
with the same spirit, and bringing a few hours of
happiness to the needy, thus driving worry out of the
mind, putting it hors de combat, so that it
need never again rise from the field.

Every blind asylum, children’s hospital, slum,
old lady’s home, old man’s home, almshouse,
poor-farm, work-house, insane asylum, prison, and
a thousand other centers where the poor, needy, sick
and afflicted gather, has its lonely hearts that long
for cherishing, aching brows that need to be soothed,
pain to be alleviated; and there is no panacea so
potent in removing the worries of our own life as to
engage earnestly in removing the positive and active
ills of others.

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People occasionally ask me if I have any hobby that
has helped me ward off the attacks of worry.
I do not believe I have ever answered this question
as fully as I might have done, so I will attempt to
do so now. One of my first hobbies was food reform
and hygienic living. When I was little more than
twelve years of age I became a vegetarian and for
nine years lived the life pretty rigorously. I
have always believed that simpler, plainer living
than most of us indulge in, more open air life, sleeping,
working, living out of doors, more active, physical
exercise of a useful character, would be beneficial.
Then I became a student of memory culture. Professor
William Stokes of the Royal Polytechnic Institution
became my friend, and for years I studied his system
of Mnemonics, or as it was generally termed “Artificial
Memory.” Then I taught it for a number of
years, and evolved from it certain fundamental principles
upon which I have largely based the cultivation of
my own memory and mentality, and for which I can never
be sufficiently thankful. Then I desired to be
a public speaker. I became a “hobbyist”
on pronunciation, enunciation, purity of voice, phrasing
and getting the thought of my own mind in the best
and quickest possible way into the minds of others.
For years I kept a small book in which I jotted down
every word, its derivation and full meaning with which
I was not familiar. I studied clear enunciation
by the hour; indeed as I walked through the streets
I recited to myself, aloud, so that I could hear my
own enunciation, such poems as Southey’s Cataract
of Lodore, where almost every word terminates
in “ing.” For I had heard many great
English and American speakers whose failure to pronounce
this terminal “ing” in such words as coming,
going, etc., used to distress me considerably.
Other exercises were the catches, such as “Peter
Piper picks a peck of pickled peppers,” or “Selina
Seamstich stitches seven seams slowly, surely, serenely
and slovenly,” or “Around a rugged rock
a ragged rascal ran a rural race.” Then,
too, Professor Stokes had composed a wonderful yarn
about the memory, entitled “My M-made memory
medley, mentioning memory’s most marvelous manifestations.”
This took up as much as three or four pages of this
book, every word beginning with m. It was a marvelous
exercise for lingual development. He also had
“The Far-Famed Fairy Tale of Fenella,”
and these were constantly and continuously recited,
with scrupulous care as to enunciation. My father
was an old-time conductor of choral and oratorio societies,
and was the leader of a large choir. I had a
good alto voice and under his wise dicipline it was
cultivated, and I was a certificated reader of music
at sight before I was ten years old. Then I taught
myself to play the organ, and before I was twenty
I was the organist and choir-master of one of the
largest Congregational churches of my native town,
having often helped my father in the past years to

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drill and conduct oratorios such as The Messiah,
Elijah, The Creation, etc. When I began
to speak in public the only special instruction I
had for the cultivation of the voice was a few words
from my father to this effect: Stand before the
looking-glass and insist that your face appear pleasant
and agreeable. Speak the sentence you wish to
hear. Listen to your own voice, you can tell
as well as anyone else whether its sound is nasal,
harsh, raucous, disagreeable, affected, or in any
way displeasing or unnatural. Insist upon a pure,
clear, natural, pleasing tone, and that’s all
there is to it. When you appear before an audience
speak to the persons at the further end of the hall
and if they can hear you don’t worry about anyone
else. Later, when I had become fairly launched
as a public speaker, he came to visit me, and when
I appeared on my platform that night I found scattered
around on the floor, where none could see them but
myself, several placards upon which he had printed
in easily-read capitals: Don’t shout—­keep
cool. Avoid ranting. Make each point clear.
Don’t ramble, etc.

When I was about fourteen I took up phonography, or
stenography as it is now known. This was an aid
in reporting speeches, making notes, etc., but
one of its greatest helps was in the matter of analysing
the sounds of words thus aiding me in their clear
enunciation.

At this time I was also a Sunday school teacher, and
at sixteen years of age, a local preacher in the Methodist
church. This led to my becoming an active minister
of that denomination after I came to the United States,
and for seven years I was as active as I knew how to
be in the discharge of this work. In my desire
to make my preaching effective and helpful I studied
unweariedly and took up astronomy, buying a three
inch telescope, and soon became elected to Fellowship
in the Royal Astronomical Society of England.
Then I took up microscopy, buying the fine microscope
from Dr. Dallinger, President of the Royal Microscopical
Society, with which he had done his great work on
bacilli—­and which, by-the-way, was later
stolen from me—­and I was speedily elected
a Fellow of that distinguished Society. A little
later Joseph Le Conte, the beloved geologist of the
California State University, took me under his wing,
and set me to work solving problems in geology, and
I was elected, in due time, a Fellow of the Geological
Society of England, a society honored by the counsels
of such men as Tyndall, Murchison, Lyell, and all
the great geologists of the English speaking world.

Just before I left the ministry, in 1889, I took up,
with a great deal of zeal, the study of the poet Browning.
I had already yielded to the charm of Ruskin—­whom
I personally knew—­and Carlyle, but Browning
opened up a new world of elevated thought to me, in
which I am still a happy dweller. In seeking
a new vocation I naturally gravitated towards several
lines of thought and study, all of which have influenced

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materially my later life, and all of which I pursued
with the devotion accorded only to hobbies. These
were I: A deeper study of Nature, in her larger
and manifestations, as the Grand Canyon of Arizona,
the Petrified Forest, the Yosemite Valley, the Big
Trees, the High Sierras, (with their snow-clad summits,
glaciers, lakes, canyons, forests, flora and fauna),
the Colorado and Mohave Deserts, the Colorado River,
the Painted Desert, and the many regions upon which
I have written books. II: The social conditions
of the submerged tenth, which led to my writing of
a book on The Dark Places of Chicago which
was the stimulating cause of W.T. Stead’s
soul-stirring book If Christ Came to Chicago.
Here was and is the secret of my interest in all problems
dealing with social unrest, the treatment of the poor
and sinful, etc., for I was Chaplain for two years
of two homes for unfortunate women and girls.
III. A deeper study of the Indians, in whom I
had always been interested, and which has led to my
several books on the Indians themselves, their Basketry,
Blanketry, etc. IV. A more detailed
study of the literature of California and the West,
and also, V. A more comprehensive study of the development
of California and other western states, in order that
I might lecture more acceptably upon these facinating
themes.

Here, then, are some of the hobbies that have made,
and are making, my life what it is. I leave it
to my readers to determine which has been the better—­to
spend my hours, days, weeks, months and years in getting
my livelihood and worrying, or in providing for my
family and myself, and spending all the spare time
I had upon these many and varied hobbies, some of
which have developed into my life-work. And I
sincerely hope I shall be absolved from any charge
of either self-glorification or egotism in this recital
of personal experiences. At the time I was passing
through them I had no idea of their great value.
They were the things to which something within me bade
me flee to find refuge from the worries that were
destroying me, and it is because of their triumphant
success that I now recount them, in the fervent desire
that they may bring hope to despondent souls, give
courage to those who are now wavering, uncertain and
pessimistic, and thus rid them of the demons of fret
and worry.

Now that I have come to my final words where all my
final admonitions should be placed, I find I have
little left to say, I have said it all, reader, in
the chapters you have read (or skipped.) Indeed I have
not so much cared to preach to you myself, as to encourage,
incite you to do your own preaching. This is,
by far, the most effective, permanent and lasting.
Improvement can come only from within. A seed
of desire may be sown by an outsider, but it must grow
in the soil of your soul, be harbored, sheltered,
cared for, and finally beloved by your own very self,
before it will flower into new life for you.
That you may possess this new life—­a life
of work, of achievement, of usefulness to others—­is
my earnest desire, and this can come only to its fullest
fruition in those who have learned to QUIT WORRYING.